Are they out there? John Magor’s UFOs — British Columbia Chronicles

I’ve never been able to quite believe in UFOs (flying saucers). Or Sasquatch. Or ghosts.

Mind you, I’ve wavered a few times, if only briefly; sometimes from reading or hearing particularly credible news reports or solid firsthand accounts of alleged sightings. Mostly, my skepticism has come closest to losing its resolve after I interviewed people who claimed to have seen something extraordinary and beyond rational explanation in the sky, or giant footprints in the snow or dirt, or they said they hadn’t just heard things that go bump in the night but seen them.

Who am I, if that person comes across as sober, rational and intelligent, to dismiss their stories out of hand?

Invariably, they have nothing in the way of tangible evidence—no ‘proof’—to show me of their encounter. But if they give every indication of being sincere and sane, I’ve always thought it presumptuous even arrogant to question their honesty.

First and foremost I’m a professional storyteller; I like to tell stories and I like being told stories. Good stories, anyway, with drama and mystery, both of which are essential ingredients to the subjects under discussion. So I continue to read in the news about seemingly inexplicable phenomena while living, coincidentally, perhaps even ironically, in the Cowichan Valley—home, I’m told, of scores of UFO and Bigfoot sightings every year.

It was recently reported that “strings of lights” had been seen in the night sky over Cowichan Bay.

“They were as bright as an average star,” said Jim Quayle, “and I thought they looked like a series of aircraft all spaced equally apart and travelling at about 30,000 or 40,000 feet in the air.” He and his son watched the lights for 10 minutes until they vanished from sight. Quayle had never “seen anything like it before”.

Quayle’s report was reiterated by a Shawnigan Lake resident, Ian Purcell, who was standing on his porch at dusk on March 16 when he saw a string of at least 100 lights soar across the horizon beyond the lake. The phenomenon was repeated the following night. This time, instead of being evenly spaced, some appeared to be travelling side by side. When an aircraft passed over at about the same altitude as the lights, Purcell thought he could see them reflecting off the plane.

In February, two similar reports from Victoria of white lights, uniformly spaced and in single file, inspired speculation of activity from a new multi-satellite system intended to improve internet service. It was also suggested that the “lights” could be nothing more than reflections of objects on the ground.

(Shades of the 1960s United States Air Force’s bland dismissal of all UFO sightings as “swamp gas!”)

John Magor would be pleased by this latest activity. The onetime editor of the Cowichan Leader is gone now, I’m sorry to say. John may well have been before his time when he began publishing, in 1969, his magazine Canadian UFO Report.

In his introductory editorial he explained: “There is evidence...that geological or geographical conditions of Canada are specially favourable to UFO operations. Is it because of our proximity to the North Pole where there is minimum interference from the Van Allen radiation belt? Is it because of the country’s enormous mineral content or is it because the Canadian terrain has some feature that invites UFO inspection?

“Of course we do not know. But we do suggest that our polar relationship is of definite significance...”

After citing similar high frequencies of sightings over Russia, South America and Australia, he repeated his belief that Canada has special attraction to UFOs: “We feel that in Canada we are in a unique position to explore those who are exploring us.”

He’d just returned from a motoring trip with his wife to the Yukon to research reports of numerous recent UFO sightings. He found “more of an epidemic—so much so that we had to leave many of the sightings unreported. Time was too short and distances too great.” Those incidents he did manage to check were confirmed, he wrote, by multiple witnesses and “none is of the crackpot variety”.

As soon became apparent, John Magor didn’t have to travel all the way to the Yukon for UFO fodder—it was right in his back yard, in Duncan and the Cowichan Valley.

Volume 1 of Canadian UFO Report prompted a letter from a Maple Bay, Duncan man who described his sighting, sometime between 1958 and 1962, of a bright cigar-shaped light over Saltspring Island. He said it resembled a fluorescent light—exactly like two saucers placed together, face to face, and flying horizontally”—and didn’t appear to be moving very fast. He said he was familiar with dirigibles and most types of ordinary aircraft and “it certainly was not like any of these”. A neighbour had confirmed his sighting.

In the same issue of the magazine Kurt Horn described his own memorable sightings of strange lights over Maple Bay in 1967 and Cowichan Leader reporter/photographer Klaus Muenter wrote of his family having spotted, in August 1967, a pulsating light that gave no sound of an engine and moved from north to sound at incredible speed until it was directly overhead. “Without stopping or reducing its speed the pulsating light suddenly altered, its course, made a right angle turn and shot away towards the east. Soon it disappeared.”

The next night, armed with binoculars, Muenter stationed himself in his garden. He saw several aircraft and a satellite then—”there it was again. This time the pulsating light, too fast to be focused in the binoculars, shot from the west. It seemed to fly lower than in the previous night. It followed a straight line and seconds later it had zoomed into space and into the maze of stars.”

As a newspaper reporter Muenter was aware of numerous reports of UFO sightings—but it took his own firsthand experience to make him a believer.

In the evening of March 7, 1969, Mrs. William Marshall of Duncan, her daughter and her girl friend, university students, were walking home from the store when they saw “a moving object in the west near a very bright star which my daughter said later she believed to be the planet Venus”. Thinking it was a new satellite, they watched as it came to a sudden stop, “hovered for a few seconds, then turned and proceeded in a northwest direction. I realized then that it could not be [a] satellite...”

They continued to watch and called her mother and husband from the house to watch also as “it appeared to be looking for something, speeding up then slowing down, almost to a standstill. It passed over Mount Prevost and turned east until it was over the large B.C. Hydro generating station, about four or five miles north of Duncan, the lights from which we can see from our house. It hovered over the generating station for about 15 minutes, and then returned over Mount Prevost again in a westerly direction for a time. It again turned and came straight towards our house, and as it passed over us we could see quite plainly its shape as it was flying at a much lower altitude than, previously and its lights threw their gleams onto the object. It was round in shape and we could plainly see it rotating. It had four lights, one green, one red, one yellow, and the other white.”

After passing slowly over her house it “hovered around for a few more minutes” then headed rapidly eastward. Mrs. Marshall timed the entire sighting from her home, situated near the eastern base of Mount Prevost, at an amazing 40 minutes. Until writing to the Canadian UFO Report she’d not gone public with what she and the others had witnessed for fear of public ridicule.

But John Magor didn’t ridicule her.

Cowichan District Hospital nurse Doreen Kendall who described her close-up view of not just a saucer-shaped UFO but its two occupants.

He was, in fact, just warming up with these vivid local accounts of Cowichan Valley UFOs, the seventh edition of his magazine devoting 10 full pages of text and photos to an “occupied” spacecraft which had been sighted, close-up, by two nurses on duty at Cowichan District Hospital on Gibbins Road. Before getting into their extraordinary story he reminded his readers that professional nursing “requires a special degree of tact, maturity and gentleness of manner”. The two middle-aged nurses, he said, were reliable witnesses who had “an inborn ability that invites trust,” and several friends and former patients had testified to their veracity.

Briefly: After a patient complained of being too warm, Miss Kendall went to the window to part the drapes and let in some fresh air. It was still dark out but she was struck in the eyes by a brilliant light radiating from a large object just 60 feet away, by the children’s ward. This placed the hovering object slightly more than a storey off the ground, just to her left.

“The object was circular and had what I guess you would call a top and a bottom. The bottom was silvery, like metal, and was shaped like a bowl. There was a string of bright lights around it like a necklace. The top was a dome made of something like glass. It was lit up from the inside and I could see right into it.”

There were two “male-like” figures in the craft, sitting one behind the other, and facing away from the hospital.

The one in front appeared to be taller or was seated higher than the other one; both were “encased in close-fitting dark material”.

Amazingly, nurse Kendall kept her cool; in fact, she said later, “I never felt so peaceful in all my life. I wish I could have talked to them.” When the craft tilted slightly towards her she could see the pilots’ feet. “They looked like fine, tall, well-built men. They were dressed in tight-fitting suits of the same material that covered their heads but their hands were bare and I noticed how human they looked. Their flesh seemed just like ours.”

Because she’d always been intrigued by automotive mechanics, she found herself staring at the craft’s large, chromed control panel—as was the crewman in the front seat. It made her wonder if they were having mechanical trouble.

She’d completely forgotten that Nurse Wilson was also in the room and, upon remembering, momentarily hesitated to speak for fear of breaking the spell. At that precise moment the second pilot in the rear seat turned and looked directly at her although she couldn’t see his face because of its mask.

She knew he saw her when he touched his partner on the back.

“When the man in the back did this, the one in front reached down and took hold of something like a lever beside him. I’ll never forget how deliberately he did it. He pushed it back and forth, and the saucer, or whatever you’d call it, started to circle closely, still close to the building, in an anticlockwise direction.”

Only then did she think to call Mrs. Wilson to the window. What she saw, to her astonishment, was a bright light the size of a car. (Based on both witnesses’ assuring him that the craft spanned five windows of the children’s ward, John Magor estimated it to have been 50 feet across.) She described it as circular, although she couldn’t see the top or bottom because of the glare, and it was moving slowly away. When it was later suggested that she and Miss Kendall had been victims of a practical joke, a plastic bag with candles in it, she snorted, “It would take a million candles to make it as bright as that.”

She didn’t see the two occupants described by Miss Kendall, perhaps because, after circling several times, it began to move away. Two other nurses, alerted by the women’s excited voices, looked out another window in time to see a “bright light” receding in the distance.

John Magor heard of the incident from yet another nurse hence his interviewing Miss Kendall and Mrs. Wilson for his magazine. Their sighting, as amazing and detailed as it is, was partially corroborated by other witnesses’ reports of a bright light “as big as a house” near the hospital at about the same time.

For her part, Miss Kendall, professional nurse that she was, dutifully entered in the hospital log that she’d seen a “flying saucer” just outside the hospital at 5:00 a.m. New Year’s morning.

An imaginative hoax? It hardly seems likely...

The cover of one of John Magor’s Canadian UFO Report magazines showing an artist’s conception of a UFO taking off from a body of water.

The back cover of the same issue showing an artist’s rendition of a flying saucer based upon eyewitness descriptions.

John Magor’s Canadian UFO Report ranged worldwide and way back into history but I’m limiting this post in the Chronicles to the above mentioned Cowichan Valley reports. Other anecdotal research over the years suggests that the Valley landmark, saddle-back Mount Prevost, has long been a hot spot for UFO sightings.

John Magor chose early retirement to take up the full-time investigation of UFOs in the late 1960s. I didn’t really know him although we spoke on the phone a few times, and I often saw him in the vicinity of the Duncan post office as both of us went about our business. By the mid-80s, even from a distance, I could see that he was having health problems. This became even more apparent to me when he showed up in my print shop one morning, tape recorder in hand, and asked to speak with my assistant. I called her to the front and resumed my work.

But when quite some time passed and she hadn’t returned to her paste-up table, I went in search. It turned out that John was there to interview her about a UFO sighting she and her boy friend had experienced some years before that had been so vivid and memory-etching, she’d described it to me and her friends. Somehow, word of her experience had reached John Magor and he, avid researcher to the end, was there in my print shop in mid-morning (and, need I say it, in mid-production), to interview Linda. And she’d been too polite to suggest another time and venue.

Later that same day, the mystery craft made a second appearance in the skies over Mill Bay and was seen by several other witnesses including Judge and Mrs. George Hallett shown here.

Well, I’d taken an interest in UFOs myself over the years; I’d even subscribed to John’s magazine. But for him to just drop in unannounced and armed with a tape recorder on UFO business when we were busy just didn’t work for me and I politely suggested that he make some other arrangement with Linda.

I don’t write of this now to make disparage John Major but to illustrate how, even in his final years of failing health, when he found it more and more difficult to get about, he doggedly followed his pursuit of information of anything related to the unexplained phenomena of aerial sightings, not just in the Cowichan Valley, but around the world. I’d always found him to be pleasant, intelligent and dedicated, qualities I respect in anyone.

But not, please, in my print shop in the midst of production!

In short, John believed UFOs to be of intelligent origin; in fact, he admitted “only one bias, namely that we [and other UFO researchers] are believers. There is so much evidence pointing to the existence of UFOs that the hardest task must lie to those who would discredit them.”

If you Google John Magor you’ll find his 1977 book Our UFO Visitors and his 1983 book Aliens Above Always: A UFO Report for sale on Amazon and used bookseller sites. But that’s it. Meaning, I like to think, that my 13 copies of Canadian UFO Reports magazine must be pretty rare.

**Here’s a great story straight from the pages of the Cowichan Leader that John Magor didn’t write about.**

It goes back to September 1908 when it was reported in a front-page story that 14-year-old Willie McKinnon had had a “most startling experience and...a miraculous escape from death” a week before.

“While working in his father [Angus’s] garden about half past 11 o’clock, a meteor[ite] about 10 inches in diameter was hurled through space and buried itself in the ground about eight feet from where the boy was standing. The meteor [sic] could be heard for several minutes before it struck the earth, but the lad, thinking it was a train passing paid no notice until the celestial visitor struck the earth, sending the rocks flying in every direction and causing an effect like an earthquake in that vicinity.

“The boy was naturally greatly alarmed at the occurrence and rushed into the house to acquaint his parents with the very strange happening. On visiting the spot it was found that the meteor[ite] was intensely hot, and not for over an hour could it be handled.

“The meteor[ite] or whatever it was that fell, looked much like an ordinary boulder, except that it was almost as round as a marble and the surface was deeply scored with what resembled hieroglyphics.

“The meteor[ite] had passed through the branches of two trees in its flight, snapping them off like matches. It fell at an angle of about 45 degrees and was travelling in a north-westerly direction when it struck the earth.”

Willie’s father had spent much of the following week trying to decipher the markings on the cannon ball from outer space.

A month later, it was reported that the Department of Mines, Geological Survey in Ottawa was seeking “further particulars than those contained in the Cowichan Leader account: the time of day; the nature of the sounds emitted by the falling body; their duration and the direction from which they seemed to come; the depth of the hole created and the nature of the soil as well as the direction in which the earth was thrown by the impact.

Quite an order for young Willie who must have been startled out of his wits at having escaped death by a mere eight feet. The government questionnaire included an offer or purchase if terms could be arranged. Whether in fact the meteorite did make it Ottawa and public preservation, I can’t say all these years later, alas, other than it’s a matter of record that Willie’s father Angus McKinnon was known to be, at the very least, argumentative; this suggests that negotiations with Ottawa would have been difficult.

As for the so-called hieroglyphics: Was it in fact a Rosetta Stone from Outer Space? Logically, the markings on the surface of the meteorite were just the finished product of its melt-down as it hurtled through space. Whatever the case, did it find its way to some cubbyhole in Ottawa or is it still in a family descendant’s possession?

That 10-inch round “marble” with its strange markings would be a great conversation piece all these years later.

Okay, a meteorite isn’t a flying saucer or even a UFO. But fascinating all the same, as I’m sure that UFO-ologist John Magor would have agreed.

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