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   PID: Synchronet 3.19b-Win32 master/a2a9dc027 Jan  2 2022 MSC 1928   
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   SUBJECT: STRANGE LIGHTS IN THE NIGHT SKY                     FILE: UFO1165   
      
      
   DAILY NEWS, Nelson, B.C., Canada - May 2, 1989   
      
   THRUMS RESIDENTS REPORT UFO SIGHTINGS   
      
   by Barbara Tandory   
      
        A quiet woman working late nights at business books stepped off the   
   sundeck   
   of her home in Thrums, and saw a UFO.  Angae Paetkau was taking the family dog   
   for a midnight walk the Sunday before Easter when a "very bright red light"   
   flashed over Mount Sentinel near her house. "It swooped down, stopped in   
   mid-air   
   and hovered, then made a little jaunt. It kept darting around and around the   
   sky."   
      
        Of it's lightning speed, she said, "They're quick, oh boy, are they   
   quick."   
   Later, she saw red and yellow lights, flashing, revolving on a dark underside,   
   it's shape made visable in the city lights from nearby Castlegar. The display   
   continued for some minutes, long enough for Paetkau to run in the house for the   
   keys of a telescope enclosed in a domed planetarium in their backyard. To her   
   disappointment, she couldn't rouse her husband from sleep.  The dog was   
   whining.   
      
        Paetkau, mother of two grown children, has seen the elusive UFOs before.   
   But she kept quiet unitl her neighbors had also seen strange lights in the   
   night   
   sky.  Kathy Tarasoff, 31, was driving home from Robson - separated from Thrums   
   only by the huge block of Mount Sentinel - with her nine-year old daughter,   
   Stacy, when a dazzling white light streaked across the night sky, shot past the   
   mountain, then went down at a steep angle in the mountains near the Castlegar   
   airport.   
      
        One moment they were singing, "All night, all day/Angels watching over me,   
   my Lord," and the next Tarasoff cried out, "Look Stacy, a falling star," and   
   already the frightened child was crying, "Mommy, Mommy . . ." They thought they   
   saw a plane about to crash, Little Stacy cried all the way home.   
      
        The abrupt change of direction, with sudden acceleration, and the light's   
   trajectory - it seemingly flew past the mountain at its lowest level -   
   suggested   
   to Taraoff that it was no falling star.  Tarasoff reported the incident   
   privately to an employee at the airport weather office, certain that she saw a   
   landing light on a small aircraft.   
      
        The airport was shut down for the night, and no missing planes have been   
   reported in the area since January.   
      
        Tarasoff - who meets life's crises head on - found that experience more   
   unsettling than going into labor with one if her three children on the way to   
   the hospital. "It was an unexplainable light." She too kept quiet about it.   
      
        It was Melody Semenoff, a vivacious 35-year-old housewife and mother of   
   three, who brought it all together, first telling her story of three bright   
   lights at the kids' gymnastics, a week after her March 7 sighting.   
      
        Soon after dark that evening, Semenoff was standing in the kitchen of her   
   little house at the foot of Mount Sentinel, cooking dinner, when she felt that   
   "something was drawing" her to go outside. She turned down the stove and went   
   outside, but there was nothing more exciting there than the "blue star", to the   
   northeast, Vega in the Summer Triangle.   
      
        Semenoff went back outside a little later with her sister-in-law, Lil   
   Perepolkin, walking a long driveway to a neighbor's house. In the sky above   
   Mount Sentinel there appeared three starry lights of dazzling whiteness.   
      
        "We saw the most incredible light stars - bright and brilliant. They   
   looked   
   like stars at first. Two of them were traveling together and they were moving,   
   but the third one didn't join them as they came close and back away again. It   
   stayed further out."   
      
        "The third light seemed to hover back and forth over the Whitewater Ski   
   hill towards Nelson, a half hour's drive from Thrums." This sighting was light-   
   hearted. "We're here, we're here," Perepolkin recalled joking when the   
   experience took on a Star Trek quality with the lights moving closer towards   
   them and darting back and forth.   
      
        Aliens and spaceship are far from Perepolkin's mind. "I saw them but I   
   don't believe in them." But she stands by Semenoff's account of white "giant   
   stars" that twinkled and radiated about 10 feet above the mountain, or so it   
   seemed. Like Kathy's white light, they too appeared to have come from a great   
   distance.  Semenoff's neighbor at the foot of the mountain, Paetkau, believes   
   that the place is visited by alien spacecraft, that"they've been here for   
   years." She maintained a sense of humor, like her neighbors, in a recent   
   interview, but admitted the high seriousness that she could see "the metal, the   
   windows and the lights on the bottom of those things" in some of her past   
   sightings.   
      
        She had seen one of them recently, a light that moved - "this light on the   
   water" of the Kootenay River near the Brilliant Dam, across the highway from   
   her   
   home. It happened on the night of Feb. 23, a day before Tarasoff's sighting.   
   That was another time that Paetkau got up from the books she keeps for a   
   service   
   station that her husband operates in Castlegar, and took the dog Prince for a   
   walk.  Paetkau said she wasn't surprised to see the revolving lights on the   
   water: "Here they go, taking our water." They are always by water, she said.   
   "They're coming here for our water," she believes.  When Tarasoff saw the light   
   as it flew past Mount Sentinel, "it looked like it was going to the (Brilliant)   
   dam."   
      
        Some UFO experts maintain that there is a connection between sightings and   
   various electrical effects - ranging from car engines dying down to power   
   blackouts of entire cities - and sometimes the phenomenon is so localized that   
   only part of the house, in the direct flight of a UFO, is affected.   
      
        In Thrums, the neighborhood experienced three power surges in a row in   
   February. All were around suppertime. Semenoff described it as an "energy   
   shooting out of the lightbulbs."   
      
        Some months ago, too, Semenoff and her husband, Charlie, were startled in   
   the middle of the night by a "flash, like somebody was taking a picture." This   
   happened four or five times, each time in their bedroom overlooking the Mount   
   Sentinel - which Melody calls the magic mountain and Charlie believes to be   
   special because of the quartz fields, coming thru a double-pane window which   
   can   
   be reached only on a ladder.   
      
        In a similar incident, remembered by Paetkau and Gordon, her husband, a   
   blinding light lit up their bedroom. "There was a flash," recalled Gordon. "It   
   lit up everything. It was pretty phenomenal, just like sheet lighting - except   
   that there was no lightning." Besides, the flash was "very constant."   
      
        Yet Gordon, as an amateur astronomer, prefers to think that there are   
   rational explanations for this and other things happening in Thrums - rocket   
   re-   
   entry with third-stage boosters going off, reflections or meteors. (UFO experts   
   agree that in about 97%, UFO sightings are due to misidentification, weather   
   conditions like air inversions, optical illusions, deliberate deception and   
   even   
   hallucinations, but the remaining 3% defy all explanation.)   
      
        Gordon Paetkau reserves his judgement about UFOs as alien machines until   
   one lands in his backyard. But he remembers the light in his bedroom as rare   
   and   
   unforgettable. "The light was like a nuclear explosion in the sky."   
      
        Some UFO research also indicates the objects seem to have a keen interest   
   in all kinds of power installations including nuclear plants, and in water. The   
   Thrums sightings occur in a setting where rivers, lakes and streams are   
   constant   
   features of the local geography. In this quiet place of high mountains and deep   
   waters and hydroelectric installations, West Kootenay Power operates three of   
   its four power plants.   
      
        And something else did happen on the night Semenoff and Perepolkin saw the   
   lights. Outside Castlegar, four miles up the Columbia River, a transformer blew   
   up at Celgar in the small hours of March 8, causing a fire that shut down the   
   380-employee pulp mill, as company officials estimate, until mid-April. (Celgar   
   has just begun operating at 10 to 15% capacity).  No one knows what happened   
   and   
   an investigation into the cause is continuing.   
      
        "There was some sort of power outage , seconds earlier," according to Ron   
   Belton, Celgar's personnal manager. "We felt a power surge but we weren't   
   sure."   
      
        At the local power company they also don't know what "tripped the line."   
   And, according to WKP public relations man Jack Fisher, there have been reports   
   of power disturbances, except for a 21-minute power blackout in most of   
   Castlegar when the transformer blew up at Celgar. Celgar is located near a   
   storage dam on the Columbia River operated by B.C. Hydro.   
      
        West Kootenay Power's Doug Ferguson in the Castlegar office explained that   
   momentary losses of power - such as the dimming of street lights, observed in   
   town around the time of the Celgar accident and Thrums sightings - are often   
   caused by nothing more than blown fuses and trees touching the power lines, and   
   go unreported since the problem can clear itself "when the reclosure comes back   
   after a 20-second delay." But, he admitted, "There are cases when we don't know   
   what happened."   
      
        One such problem occured on the night of March 7, a few hours before the   
   Celgar fire, when musicians playing in the Hi Arrow bar in Castlegar   
   experienced   
   a power surge in the middle of a set. Bar manager Garry Clarkston described   
   what   
        happened: "Pooof. Everything went down - the lights went out, the band   
   equipment went down, the till - then came right on. It was real quick."   
      
        The bar and the pulp mill, however, are powered by different substations.   
   In the case of Castlegar and Thrums, even the power plants are different   
   because   
   Thrums, although located near the Brilliant dam, which supplies Castlegar, is   
   actually fed from the South Slocan plant.   
      
        The women in Thrums are also in the dark about their electrical problems   
   and their sightings.   
      
        Over the years there have been sighting of light objects, anecdotal and   
   unreported, coming form the Russian Doukhobor communities deep in the dark   
   Slocan Valley. The most recent sightings are just beyond the city limits and   
   centre on Mount Sentinel near the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia   
   rivers.   
      
        The mountain has a special place in the religious Doukhobor tradition -   
   the   
   first Russian settlers early in the century names it Mount Sinai, after the   
   holy   
   hill in Jerusalem, the home for God - and is the burial place for their leader   
   Peter the Lordly Verigin.   
      
        In that old, half-forgotten tradition there is a belief in other worlds   
   and   
   visitors from them. Still, it came no easier to Semenoff, Perepolkin, and   
   Tarasoff to go public with their stories than it did to their non-Russian   
   neighbor Paetkau.  But they agree with her when she says, "It's breathtaking."   
      
   =END=   
      
                    
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