Did you see them
The Sighting
On Sunday November 28th 1976, at about 8:00 PM, two friends and I witnessed something that changed us forever. From the west, we saw a flotilla of 8 or 9 glowing red spheres, each about 50 feet across, silently approaching. They moved in a straight line, low over the treetops — no sound, no flicker, no visible structure, just brilliant, solid globes of light.
The Maneuvers
As they drew closer, we watched in amazement as the first three spheres seemed to “play,” gliding around each other and nearly touching before returning to formation. It was as if they were aware of us, putting on a display. The line of spheres continued eastward, gliding slowly, deliberately, and without a sound. They passed almost directly overhead at about 75–100 feet, close enough for us to feel their presence.
Our Response
We jumped into the car and tried to follow them, but they were gone as silently as they’d come. Shaken and excited, we called the local radio station to report what we’d seen, only to hear the announcer say the switchboard was jammed with similar calls. Later, police told us they had received reports too, but suggested it was just “planes” — something we knew could not explain what we had witnessed.
The Bigger Picture
The entire event lasted only minutes, but the impression has stayed with me for nearly fifty years. We were not alone that night — reports came in from across North America, from Mexico up to Northern Quebec, describing the same strange red spheres in the sky. This was one of the largest UFO “flaps” in modern history, and yet it was never seriously investigated. I share my account here not to convince, but to bear witness. If you have seen something similar — especially during the 1976 wave — I invite you to share your experience in the comment section at the bottom of the page. You are welcome to remain anonymous.
The following sections go into detail about what happened during and after the event.
You can scroll to each one or click on the title listed in the index and it will take you to that section. Or you are welcome to skip all of the details and go straight to the comment section if you wish to leave a comment
Index
Business Title
There were no visible features or structures on any part of the spheres that I could see - a complete absence of the usual structures you would see on the sides of any aircraft, such as windows, portals, antennae, navigation lights, and no exhaust trails either. They were all entirely uniform in shape and color, each glowed with a steady, red orangish glow. They weren't pulsating or making any sound at all, just completely silent, which made them appear to be floating, but in a perfectly straight line, no wobbling up and down or back and forth. Then the first three switched positions.
The Maneuvers
As if this flotilla of impossibly large floating globes wasn't bizarre enough to try and process, a slow, but
precise 'rearranging' of the first 3 spheres occurred when the first sphere was directly in front of me. The entire flotilla had slowed almost to a stop. The first sphere rose upwards and above the other spheres, then the 3rd one dropped down, and they switched places. Then the 2nd one switched places with the 3rd one. I suppose it just seemed to me in my 16 year old mind, that the switching places must be something they just did in their travels, for whatever reason. It wasn't until about a year ago when I started checking UFO websites for any reports of the same objects, that it occurred to me that maybe they did this maneuver as kind of a signal, to let me know that they were aware that I was watching them. After all, they had been in a straight formation like railway cars, evenly spaced from each other, until they slowed as they approached where I was standing. Like a friendly "Hello, we see you there." Sure beats some kind of laser weapon that could have cremated me on the spot. Of course I hadn't considered anything like that until I was in my 60's.
I do recall being completely mesmerized by them, no sense of panic or fear of any kind. From the time I first spotted the red light about a mile or so off to my left, they seemed to have followed an arc, perhaps following the railway tracks that ran behind the building, at the bottom of the slope in front of me.
When the first 3 switched places, they almost touched each other as one exchanged places with the other. All very smooth movements. I know that had they been helicopters or any kind of aircraft we commonly see in our skies, they came so close to touching each other, that they would absolutely have crashed into each other. It was at this moment I realized I wanted Carl and Glenda to see them, and I ran to the apartment intercom at the entrance, and told them to get out onto their balcony.
When I ran back to where I had been standing, I could see my friends watching from their balcony. The spheres had returned to a perfectly straight formation and slowly headed off in the direction of the lake.
The Chase
From down below, I heard my friends yelling, "What the f*ck are those?!" Carl yelled down to me, "Hey let's follow them in the car!" They quickly ran out to the car and we headed down the road that was in the direction the spheres were headed, towards a lake we called The Conservation Area, or The Dam. We could see them off in the distance getting smaller, until they disappeared over the horizon. No point driving any further when we could no longer see them.
Carl's father worked evenings doing maintenance in the Conservation office, and we were almost there, so we stopped there to see if he saw them. He said he hadn't seen anything, and chuckled that we must be stoned.
We weren't stoned, but seriously stunned, to say the least. The same question kept repeating and circulating between us on the way back to their apartment - "What the hell were they?" and "I've never seen anything like that in my life!"
We all agreed we should call the radio station when we got back (it was1976 - no cell phones) to report what we saw.
Public Reaction
We spent about an hour trying to get through to the local radio station. The line was busy. We kept asking each other if we all saw the same thing. I went through how I first spotted them till I ran to the intercom to get them. The adrenalin levels were quite high. More of the same questions to each other, about what we thought they were. We all had the same answer, "I have no idea." At one point, one of us said, "They were UFO's. Real UFO's, no doubt about it!"
When the DJ at the radio station answered after about an hour of us taking turns calling, he answered the phone by saying, "Hello CFTJ, did you see the lights too?"
"Yes, yes we did. They were red and in a straight line and huge and silent!" We told him how we tried to follow them, but lost them as they disappeared over the horizon beyond the lake.
The DJ said that his switchboard had been lit up for the past hour and a half with people calling to report them (which is how I know 100 % that we weren't the only people who saw them). He said our description matched all the other callers. He said he had called the Waterloo Regional Police Dept to report them, and ask if they were getting any calls about them. He said he was told by the dispatcher, "Yes, a few."
When I went to my welding course the next day at the college, I tried telling the guys when we were in the cafeteria about the lights, but nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. The eye rolling was frustrating and I found myself repeating a few times that "No, we weren't stoned on acid, or magic mushrooms." After a couple of days of futile searching for another witness, or even anyone willing to listen with at least an open mind, I figured I might as well chalk it up to a cool experience, and I had welding tickets to earn, and hopefully good trade work ahead. Trust me, I have no idea how I was able to just compartmentalize the experience and get on with the every day mundane tasks we all needed to do. Today I'm sure if I saw something like that for the first time, I would be walking in a daze like a zombie, trying to process it, and probably insisting everyone listen to me!
I told my father as soon as I got home, and he believed me right away. I think he had always wanted the phenomenon of UFO's and aliens from another planet to be real, as one day they might land and solve all his problems. Life had not been very good to my parents, so even though the chance was remote, a visit from wise and wonderful aliens seemed like a light at the end of a very long dark tunnel, instead of the locomotive the light usually turned out to be.
We watched the news the following evening after the event, waiting for any report of the red spheres. Surely this was going to be the biggest news to hit not only Galt Ontario, but the whole country, maybe the world. Finally, the anchor on the evening news said something about "strange lights in the sky reported over the region the previous evening." My father and I looked at each other and said "Yes! This is it!"
They interviewed a cop from the Kitchener Regional Police who stated that he saw them, and that "...they were the Canadian Air Force aerobatic team, The Snowbirds, flying to a show in Montreal." I just shook my head in disbelief, and my father, who believed we saw something not of this world, said right away, in disgust, "That cop has been told to say that, to put an end to the speculation of what the lights in the sky might have been." The first thing I said was, "No way. They were perfectly silent, and the first 3 came so close to each other as they moved in and out of their place in the formation, that if they were those jets, for sure they would have crashed into each other. Plus, they were only about a hundred feet over my head. I now live near a base where the Snowbirds practice every year, and one time, one of them flew right over our neighborhood. It was by far the loudest noise I had ever experienced. Not a chance that what we saw were jets, or any other type of combustible engine type aircraft.
Official Response
I learned over the next couple of days that people who hadn't actually seen them, but had heard about them, seemed to accept the 'Snowbirds' story as fact, and just shrugged the whole matter off, assured that that's what they had to be. No point in any further discussion.
And it seemed, for some inexplicable reason, those who did actually see them, just went back to work, to their lives, as if nothing of major significance had just happened in our skies a couple nights before. I guess that's what I did. Besides, what good would it do for regular people to insist on an in depth investigation? There were bills to pay, groceries to buy, cars that needed fixing. Seeing those objects and raising hell about them, wasn't going to put food on the table or gas in the tank. There was Earthly chores to be done.
A few months later, or maybe even a couple of years later, I was reading one of the popular science magazines at the time, OMNI, or Scientific American etc, and saw a paragraph that described a mysterious group of red lights moving in a straight formation through the skies, in November '76, and had been reported from Mexico to Northern Quebec. But no follow up. Nothing. I have watched quite a few UFO documentaries over the years, and have never seen a photo that remotely came close to the spheres we saw that night. As I watched those and listened to the 'experts', I would always wonder to myself, "But what about the red spheres?"
I've left my story on a couple of UFO sites about 10 years ago, the ones that take reports, and I did get two replies last year when I reported it on a Canadian UFO Facebook page. One person said they got chills reading my account, as they distinctly remember late in the evening, some time in November of 1976, somewhere in Southern Ontario, their house was suddenly flooded with red light coming through the windows from the outside. There was apparently no noise associated with it and they were freaked out and just stayed still until the red light in the house faded away.
Another person said they recall their father would once in a while bring up his own account, seeing the big red lights he watched up in the sky, I think in the Niagara Region, in 1976, around the same time of year that we saw them.
Other than that, it's been crickets. For such a colossal event, there has been nothing for the past nearly 50 years. How could something of that magnitude, that was apparently reported the same night from Mexico to northern Quebec, not receive any coverage other than one constable who claimed they were the Snowbirds, then one paragraph in a science magazine? That has baffled me all this time, about as much as the actual event.
Other Orb/Sphere Sightings in 1976
Charlie Red Star, Carman Manitoba (1975–76)
For months, townspeople in southern Manitoba reported red glowing spheres — so common that people lined the streets after dark to watch them. Many described playful, seemingly purposeful maneuvers, echoing what I witnessed that November night.
Shag Harbour UFO Incident, Nova Scotia (1967)
In this famous Canadian case, multiple witnesses saw a glowing object descend into the water. The event triggered a joint Canadian/U.S. military investigation. While officials acknowledged something unexplainable, no definitive explanation was ever given.
Tehran, Iran (1976)
Military jets were scrambled to intercept a bright, maneuvering UFO. Both aircraft experienced sudden instrumentation and weapons-system failures when approaching the object, forcing them to break off. The event was well-documented in U.S. defense records.
Together, these cases show that glowing red orbs and large luminous objects have been seen across North America and beyond — sometimes investigated, sometimes ignored, but rarely explained.
Only recently, as I was putting this together, with nearly 50 years now behind me, thinking of the red spheres from time to time, did it occur to me that something very obvious was missing that night — the military. Eight or nine massive, glowing red spheres silently crossing three countries’ airspace should have triggered an immediate response. In other UFO events, like the 1976 Tehran case, jets were scrambled, and in Shag Harbour, Canadian and U.S. military were openly involved. Yet on this November night in 1976, there was nothing — no jets, no helicopters, no apparent attempted interception or even just trying to follow them.
No military. not even any Men in Black.
Well, none that we saw. There is zero percent chance that people protecting our skies weren't aware of them. Zero.
Why?
Several possibilities come to mind: perhaps radar failed to track them, perhaps authorities recognized them as something not hostile, or perhaps orders were given not to engage. Whatever the reason, the silence of the spheres was matched by the silence of the military. That realization makes the event even more baffling.
Where was the military?
Closing Thoughts
Business Title
The spheres we saw were as real as anything else in this world. I asked ChatGPT and Fiverr graphic artist Jawaria, to create images that depict the spheres as I saw them all those years ago. It's more baffling than frustrating that there has been no acknowlegment of them for nearly 5 decades. I am however glad that I had the privilege or fortune to have seen them. They certainly opened my mind to the possibility of life somewhere else in the expanse of the Universe. There is no way you could convince me otherwise.
Maybe it's time to tell that story you heard about them from someone who saw them. Maybe it's your story.
Thank you.
Peace,
Earl
November 1976 -
WE WERE NOt ALONE
Leave your thoughts / memories
I’ve lived in Galt all my life. Since childhood I’ve had a strong recollection of a vivid dream where I saw uap flying above me in my backyard in east Galt. I would have been about 9 in 1976.
I’m reading Diana Palsulka’s book Encounters. After reading about synchronicities and “book encounters”, which is when someone finds a book that helps explain or reframe past encounters, I decided to google “uap encounters in Galt Ontario in the 1970’s”. I immediately found 8redspheres. Synchronicity.
I don’t know if I saw what you saw. I don’t know if I was dreaming. But I do know that I can still vividly recall what I thought was a dream I had 50 years ago.
I believe