UFO spotted in Bayham: the Highway 19 car-pacing sighting, Straffordville and Port Burwell, 1978

Bayham Township lies in Elgin County, Ontario, near the north shore of Lake Erie. Straffordville is inland. Port Burwell sits on the lake, about 10 km to the south. In 1978 Highway 19 joined the two. Today that stretch is mostly Elgin County Road 19.

On 8 September 1978 the Tillsonburg News ran a story by reporter Jim Hevenor under the headline "UFO spotted in Bayham." It said at least seven Straffordville area residents had seen something strange the week before.

Monday, 28 August 1978. About 10:30 p.m. Six young women were heading south on Highway 19, home to Port Burwell after a ball game in Straffordville. Then they saw red, white and green lights. An object was following their car along the highway, about 50 feet overhead.

They stopped, and the object slowed nearly to a halt. Then a white light came down out of it. They called the sound "indescribable," unlike any plane or helicopter. For a few minutes the car radio cut in and out. Then the object moved west and vanished.

The women were not alone on the road. Ed Matschke, an insurance agent from Straffordville, was driving the other way that night, north from Port Burwell toward home. He saw the unusual lights too. When he opened his car window, the object hovered above him.

"It stayed in the area for quite awhile and it followed my car," he said. Was it an aircraft? Matschke ruled it out. "It wasn't a jet," he said. A jet would not be flying that low.

The women did not go to the police. "We were too scared," one of them said. Matschke didn't say too much about it to anybody. The newspaper account mentions no RCMP or OPP report. Canada's federal UFO files, now held by Library and Archives Canada, do cover 1978, but whether a report of this sighting sits among them is still unknown.

The witnesses weighed the obvious answers themselves. Too low for a jet. Too strange a sound for a plane or a helicopter. No official body or investigator has ever offered an explanation.

A sceptic would likely start with aircraft. Red, green and white are the standard colours of aircraft navigation lights, and Port Burwell sits on Lake Erie, which carries air and lake traffic. But that idea has never been tested against this case, and it does not account for what the witnesses described. The hovering, the descending white light, the sound they could not place.

The story faded. In September 2013, 35 years later, the Tillsonburg News reprinted it in its "From the Archives" column. It remains the only known account, and the six women remain unnamed. Twenty-two years earlier to the day, on 28 August 1956, a driver near Innerkip, about 40 km to the north, reported a disc that shone a beam on his truck. A different case, but the same date and the same corner of Ontario.