Noëlville OPP Sighting: The Bell-Shaped Glow over Mason Township

Mason Township lies near Noëlville, in the Sudbury District of northern Ontario. Since 1999 it has been part of the Municipality of French River. In February 1969 the fields were under snow. In the same region stood CFS Falconbridge, a radar station on the Pinetree Line.

Wednesday evening, February 5, 1969. Lionel Chartrand and his wife saw an orange glow reflected off the snow in their fields. Its source was hovering over trees a mile south of the Chartrand home, near Highway 69 by the newspaper's account. They watched it for about 20 minutes. Then they got up the nerve to phone the police.

Constable D. G. White of the Ontario Provincial Police, Noëlville detachment, took the call at home while eating dinner. His first thought was that it was just a crank call. Then he reconsidered. If there was something there, it might be worth seeing. He drove out, and the object was still there.

White raised his binoculars. The object looked roughly bell-shaped. "It was first orange, then turned a silver grey, and then back to orange." There was no noise from it. He could not tell how far away it was, or how large it was.

"It was not moving fast, like a plane or a shooting star." It was moving in a southwesterly direction, and for about three minutes it stayed in view. Then it slowly sank behind trees on the horizon. "It was disappearing over the horizon or behind the trees when I last saw it." His verdict was plain: "There was definitely something up there."

White phoned the Canadian Forces base at Falconbridge. "The man who took the message made no comment on the sighting," he said. Chief Warrant Officer H. W. Grant later spoke for the station. He called it "just one of many similar sightings" and said, "We don't bother much with them." Standing orders were to "pass it on to the National Research Council in Ottawa", and he recalled "a rash of sightings at one time in the past".

Radar offered no help. "The scopes are only used to check the equipment," Grant explained, so "it would be very unlikely that an operator would have noticed the object". The data went directly to North Bay and a computer which picked out any suspicious objects. The Sudbury Star ran his comments under a blunt headline: "Just Another UFO Report".

The case survives in three newspaper reports. Two appeared in the Sudbury Star, and a Canadian Press version ran in North Bay's Nugget under the headline "OPP sees UFO". There are no photographs, no film and no radar data, and no one alleged a hoax. The National Research Council's "Non-Meteoritic Sightings" file, now digitised at Library and Archives Canada, is the natural place for a record. None has been found, and it is not known whether this report was ever sent on.

No explanation was offered at the time beyond Grant's shrug, and no official finding has surfaced since. Three witnesses, one of them a police officer with binoculars, described the same silent glow over the same treeline. Six years later CFS Falconbridge would sit at the centre of a far better documented incident, in November 1975. The Noëlville sighting remains a quieter story. A glow on the snow, a reluctant constable, and a report that was passed along and then forgotten.