MUFON 76104

Possibly late 1959, Churchill, while on way to Cubs, saw a stationary object, circular from the bottom, that transitioned through sequential colour changes. When I was a kid, for two years from 1959 to 1961 my family lived in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. It may have been around mid-October 1959 1 later in the year, but before snowfall that I was on my way to Cub Scouts when I saw something unusual. To get to the cub shack, I would cut through a number of buildings, generally trying to avoid walking outside too much because of the risk of encountering polar bears. However, the last leg of the walk to the shack was down a dirt road isolated from other buildings. To provide some perspective, the Hudson Bay was to my right across an expanse of rocks as I walked towards the cub shack. Suddenly, another kid on his way to cubs up the road ahead of me said, 1look at that,1 or words to that effect. Looking up, I saw a perfect circle profiled against the already dark sky. The circumference of the circle was clearly defined, but the interior looked like a rolling cloud or plasma about as bright as neon (as I would think later when I saw neon signs in Regina), though there was no lighting effect on the ground. I don1t recall the colour when I first saw it, but of those I can recall, it would transition through red, green, yellow, a dark colour that made it look like it had disappeared, and white. The colour changes accompanied a rolling appearance in the cloud or plasma towards the center. That rolling motion can be visualized by imagining the effect of tossing a stone in a pond and watching the waves ripple out from the point that the stone hit the water, but in reverse, such that the rolling, wave motion moved from the periphery of the circle inwards, towards the center. As soon as the rolling 1wave1 hit the center, the entire colour changed, and the sequence repeated. It was quite spectacular. Thinking that it was the northern lights, I thought that I should try to remember the sequence of colour changes so that I could tell my parents and they would know I really saw the northern lights. But, whenever I thought I had the sequence nailed, either it changed or I was uncharacteristically confused. After a couple or more minutes of this, the other kid further up the road said, we1d better hurry, or we1d be late, and I went on to cubs. Oddly, perhaps, I always thought of what I saw as the northern lights, and even when I saw pictures of the northern lights later I would just think that the one I saw was better. At about seventeen, when I told the story of my northern lights to someone I knew who was studying television repair at Algonquin College, he said that what I saw was a UFO, so I got some books and read up on UFOs and concluded that he was probably right. If it was a UFO, it was either very large or very low because I was looking straight upward at it the whole time and it virtually filled my field of vision. Unfortunately, though, I neither saw it come nor go, it was just there when I looked up, and it never occurred to me to look back when I left. I have been lucky enough to see a few UFOs since that time, but it has always seemed strange to me that they have always been different, one from the other, and that in reading reports I1ve never come across one described quite like that one in Churchill. The dates are my best guess. I put this story online once a couple of years ago in the hope that one of the other kids who must have seen it would come forward, or that someone who saw something like this anywhere else would say so. No luch so far.