Prince George glowing sphere

In the late 1960s, Canada had a place for strange things in the sky. The National Research Council kept a federal file of what it called "non-meteoric sightings". Today those files sit at Library and Archives Canada, part of a collection of about 9,500 documents from the Department of National Defence, the Department of Transport, the NRC and the RCMP, spanning 1947 to the early 1980s.

Wednesday, 1 January 1969. New Year's Day in Prince George, British Columbia. It was late afternoon. Three witnesses, unrelated to one another, reported the same thing. A strange, round object in the sky. The sphere radiated a yellow-orange light.

Then it moved. According to the account preserved by Library and Archives Canada, it appeared to ascend from 2,000 to 10,000 feet. The surviving summaries say nothing of its size, of any sound, or of how long it stayed in view. Just a glowing ball, climbing above the city.

A later popular retelling says three separate phone calls were made to the police. The reports reached the NRC fast. On 3 January 1969, two days after the sighting, the council filed its report. It sits in record UAR/N69/001-030, a file that appears to hold the first 30 reports of the year. Five pages in the database carry the Prince George date.

Those pages are likely to hold the rest of the story. The names of the witnesses. Where they stood. The exact time, the duration, and any comment from the investigators. The pages have been located and identified. They have not yet been transcribed.

Not every telling agrees. Curiocity dates the event to "the evening of July 1s, 1969" and says the glowing sphere "fell several thousand feet but did not hit the ground." The other details match, and the archive holds no July 1969 record for Prince George. The likeliest reading is a mangled "January 1st". The fall may be a garbled retelling too. That version also records the outcome. Nothing was found, and there was no further evidence that anything had been there.

No hoax has been alleged. No source has proposed an explanation. No conclusion from the NRC, the Department of National Defence or the RCMP has surfaced. What remains is the label the NRC gave it. Non-meteoric. Library and Archives Canada later chose the case as one of the highlighted sightings in its virtual exhibition, Canada's Unidentified Flying Objects: The Search for the Unknown. The Prince George Citizen has called UFOs over the city "an unexplained mystery".

It never reached the fame of Falcon Lake or Shag Harbour, both honoured on glow-in-the-dark coins by the Royal Canadian Mint. Prince George has no coin. Researchers such as Chris Rutkowski have drawn on the same government files. For now, the three witnesses of New Year's Day remain nameless, and their sphere waits on five untranscribed pages.