The Ghost-like Object over Fleetwood School, Lethbridge

The old Fleetwood Elementary School stood in the Duff Addition of south Lethbridge, Alberta. Three storeys of brick and stone. The school board named it in 1910 after its chairman, John Harry Fleetwood, and it opened in autumn 1911. Half a century later, something began to appear around it after dark.

November 23, 1962. 10:30 p.m. Three Lethbridge high-school boys saw something they could not name. They saw it again on November 30 at 9 p.m. And again on December 1, at the same hour.

One of the boys gave the detailed account. The object was "slightly elliptical in shape," with "a width of about six feet." It had a "translucent bluish color, giving off a small amount of light." It did not fly in. "At first it wasn't there and then it was."

One night it was "stationary in the air," about 20 feet from the ground. Another night it "appeared over the bell tower on the Fleetwood school." No sound was mentioned. No departure was described.

The boys threw rocks at it. The rocks "veered off in another direction." The witness could not tell whether they bounced off something solid or were pushed away. "It's kind of scary when you see it," he said.

The three boys asked that their names be kept out of print. At least half a dozen of their friends confirmed the sightings. Many more children had seen it, the paper said, but kept quiet for fear of being laughed at. The main witness added that two friends had seen the object about three years earlier, on six evenings in a row. No adult is named as a witness.

The Calgary Herald ran the story on Thursday, December 13, 1962, under the headline "Mysterious 'Something' Scares School Children In Lethbridge." One boy had sent a report to what the paper called "the Unidentified Flying Objects Agency in the United States." No group by that name is known. A later blog cites the APRO Bulletin of January 1963, so the report probably reached APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. That bulletin survives only as a scan, and its Lethbridge entry remains unread. No government inquiry and no investigative conclusion has turned up.

The doubts began with the witnesses themselves. "I've heard stories that it's somebody playing a prank," the boy said, adding that he would like to know if that were so. No prankster and no method was ever named. His mother put it down to "an active imagination." No other conventional explanation was offered.

The case lives on through the Herald article, reproduced word for word by Patrick Gross and in the UFO BC Collison Collection. In January 2014, Carli Kogler revived it as "UFO Case File 1" on the Lethbian Love blog, noting that the object looked and behaved quite differently from other aerial sightings of its era. The school is gone. Its demolition was announced on January 13, 1971. What hung over its bell tower was never named.