March 28, 1968
Mr. W. Corey
431 Blythe Avenue
Hanaimo, British Columbia
Dear Mr. Corey:
Your interesting observations outlined in your letter of March 11 have been forwarded to me by Mr. McQuarrie at the Connales Observatory. I have placed your observations on our file of aerial phenomena which is maintained at the Meteor Centre.
I cannot give you a full explanation of what you and your friends have seen as there is not enough data to do this. However, I can make a few comments which may or may not be applicable. These stem from my experience of over forty years in dealing with observations of things seen in the sky.
You mentioned that you had some films with an interesting image on them but that apparently you erased an image on the emulsion while attempting to clean the negatives. Unless you destroyed the emulsion completely, you would not erase a true image and this leads me to suspect that what you had was some kind of a fault or mark rather than an image in the emulsion. There are many types of these and they often can be erased when cleaning a negative.
The second comment refers to the print of your picture taken at 9:20 p.m. on January 29, and your observation of the same date. I cannot be sure of what you saw but I can say that, in the position you gave just at that time and from your latitude, the bright star Vega was just below your horizon. Frequently, an anomalous refraction will enlarge the image of a star in this position and bring it up above the horizon giving it various peculiar motions as the refraction effects vary. The image on the picture you took looks very much like a bright star image and has about the right motion. I am not saying this is what you actually saw, but it certainly is a possibility and the picture
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National Research Council of Canada/
Conseil national de recherches du Canada
RG 77, Vol. 306