The Alaska Highway Ambulance Encounter

Boxing Day, 1976, in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An ambulance from Haines Junction was bringing a patient east along the Alaska Highway, the road known as the Alcan. Two Whitehorse ambulance attendants, Tom Banks and Ken Schofield, set out west to meet it and take over the patient. It was evening. Accounts put the time at about 6:30 p.m. or around 7:30 p.m.

A few miles north of the Takhini Bridge, the two men noticed a light. "We saw what we thought at first was a very bright star," Schofield said. "It seemed stationary, then all of a sudden it started to move."

The bright, white object seemed to travel maybe a couple of thousand feet above the ground. It moved slowly, and for a while they thought it might be a plane. Then it took off with great speed over the mountain. "It did not turn, but instantly reversed its course." Schofield added, "It looked to me like it might have been lost."

Banks decided to turn on the ambulance beacon to see what would happen. For some reason, it went off. The object buzzed the ambulance several times, and the men said they had no control over the electrical system during those passes. Later, the object paced the vehicle and flashed a bright light back after Banks flashed the beacon. Near Mendenhall, it veered into a draw and the men saw the ground brilliantly illuminated through a clearing about 100 yards ahead.

The attendants radioed the RCMP. A patrol car under Cpl. George Bliss turned around. The men met the ambulance from Haines Junction and transferred the patient. Then Bliss followed them several hundred yards behind, all the way back to Whitehorse.

The object appeared twice more on the drive home. The second time it was at tree level when it first appeared. Then it zoomed to between 1,000 to 2,000 feet within seconds, and disappeared. What the police saw of these later sightings remains undocumented.

The RCMP produced a report file dated April 5, 1977, which found its way into the files of the Center for UFO Studies. The story ran in the Whitehorse Star and in Canadian UFO Report #26. Mark Rodeghier then included it in his 1981 catalogue, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference.

Rodeghier's version differs. It describes two oval-shaped objects, 25 miles northwest of Whitehorse, pacing the ambulance for 22 minutes. The UFOs would dart back and forth in the sky. The driver used his dome light and siren to signal them. The UFOs flashed light back at them for a few seconds, then skipped off over the trees.

No conclusion from the RCMP file has been published. No hoax has ever been alleged. The witnesses themselves first took the light for a star, then for a plane. Both ideas fell away, they said, once they saw its speed and its instant reversals. A coincidental fault in the beacon circuit has been suggested as one avenue for the electrical trouble. It does not account for the illuminated ground or the reversals as described.

The case survives in the Yukon archive of UFO*BC, in NICAP's 1976 chronology, and in Donald Johnson's day-by-day chronology. It belongs to a busy Yukon season. That same year a light reportedly followed a school bus between Lake Laberge and Whitehorse for weeks, and a small white UFO was reported over Pelly Crossing in December. The ambulance on the Alcan remains one of the region's unexplained encounters.