The UFO phenomenon often seems to happen in waves. Every once in a while a particular place will seem to draw these strange anomalies to it for reasons we can’t possibly comprehend. On occasion, some of these spates of UFO sightings will take a sharp turn into the truly bizarre, and one of these was a case from Canada that ended with a piece of physical evidence in the form of a copper disk apparently left behind by aliens, and which has never been deciphered.
In 1967, the city of Edmonton, of the Canadian province of Alberta, would experience a series of very strange events. It seems to have begun in the early morning hours of May 8, 1967, when a 14-year-old boy by the name of Ricky Banyard saw “a spaceship” in the sky as he walked through the Mount Pleasant Cemetery on his way home at around 2 a.m. It was described as being spherical in shape, with red and green lights and top and bottom parts that were spinning. From the bottom of the craft emanated a beam of bright white light that seemed to be scouting the ground below like a searchlight. The boy went to get his friend, Glenn Coates, and they both watched as it made its way towards some trees in the cemetery. They decided to get some binoculars and hide behind a tree nearby, where they were able to get a close look at the object, and Banyard would explain of what they saw:
It was 200 to 300 feet in the air and made a muffled whistling noise as it hovered. A white ribbon of light came from the bottom of it and spread out in a rectangular shape about 15 centimeters above the ground. The ground was white, as though white hot under it. When I stepped out from the trees for a better look, the light disappeared then there was kind of a screaming noise like a jet starting up. All the lights in the ship went out and there were about seven or eight bangs and it took off.
When they inspected the area where the light had hit the ground, they found some rectangular-shaped black streaks on the gravel road that wound through the cemetery. Banyard would make a sketch of the UFO, and when word got out about what he had seen there were droves of curiosity coming to the cemetery every night hoping to get a glimpse of the mysterious object. Two days after Banyard’s experience, a middle-aged couple living nearby also saw what they described as a spherical craft with red and blue flashing lights on its edges and a beam shooting down from beneath it. Ten days after that, a 29-year-old school janitor by the name of Jack Strangman saw a “whitish, oval-shaped” object lurking over the cemetery, and at around the same time a “really bright, egg-shaped” craft with two pulsing red lights at each end was seen streaking away from the cemetery and into the night by a witness named Norman Fibke. This series of sightings stirred up a lot of media coverage and talk at the time, and strange lights would be seen in the skies of Edmonton throughout the summer, but it would not be until November of that year where the strangest case of all would emerge.
On November 4th, 1967, an Italian immigrant in the area known only as “L.R.” walked back to his home after dinner with friends at around 11:30 p.m. and then sat in his room having a cigarette and relaxing, when he looked out through the window and noticed an extremely bright red light streaking through the sky over the Saskatchewan River near the Riverside Municipal Golf Course. He watched as it took a trajectory towards the ground and then stopped to hover in the sky. Although he had at first thought it was a plane, he could now see that it was not, and his curiosity caused him to go to the window for a closer look. He could see that the object was round in shape, and had a very bright red, pulsating light, almost blinding in its intensity.