The ample response we’ve received from readers regarding the UFO sighting at the Cowichan District Hospital in 1970 came as a surprise to me, although I should have expected it.
I’ve heard from a growing list of people since the Royal Canadian Mint announced early this month that it was producing new collectible silver coins to commemorate the event in which a nurse and a number of other people witnessed a saucer-shaped craft with a glass-like dome top and some sort of people or aliens inside it hovering just outside a hospital room window early on New Year’s Day.
The legend of the UFO survived and spread over the decades, and the story has been written about in numerous publications and books since then, but I figured that the decision by the Royal Canadian Mint to capture the sighting on a coin that is the sixth in the mint’s Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena series would shake the tree and people with knowledge of what happened would finally come out of the woodwork with different takes on the incident.
And, sure enough, it didn’t take long for Dan Hughes, who has lived in the Cowichan Valley since 1969, to call me with his knowledge of the sighting.
He said a couple who lived adjacent to the hospital at the time had a New Year’s Eve party and decided to make a UFO out of slim pieces of wood, a plastic laundromat bag and some candles that was made lighter than air with a hair dryer and then was sent air borne before it drifted close to the hospital where it was spotted by those in the hospital room.
Hughes said he sat on his knowledge of the incident until he read the story about the Royal Canadian Mint commemorating it on a collectible coin and decided it was time for the truth to come out.
I had a call shortly after I wrote the story about Hughes’s explanation for the UFO from a couple who were at the New Year’s Eve party in 1970 and they confirmed Hughes’ version of events.
I thought that pretty much explained the whole thing until I received a call from Joan Hieta, who was the patient in the hospital room and was a first-hand witness to the UFO sighting.
She didn’t think it was a fake at all.
“[The UFO] was slowly coming towards the window until it was just a few feet away and I swear I saw panels with instruments and lights on them and two black figures as well, although they were not as clear,” Hieta told me.
“It then tilted and began to move away. It seemed real enough to me and to everyone else that was in the room and it shook us all up.”
So what really happened in the wee hours of New Year’s Day outside of that hospital room?
I consider myself a rather practical fellow and tend to lean towards Hughes’s explanation for the UFO, but there’s a lot that we don’t understand going on in the world and the universe and I’ve learned to always keep an open mind.
With new and modern telescopes and other high-tech instruments, we’re now confident that the universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, with each containing hundreds of billions of stars and maybe even more planets, so who is to say what is actually out there?
It seems to me, and to a lot of scientists, that, by the laws of probability, there have to be other planets and places in this vast universe where other intelligent and technological species have developed.
But whether they’ve actually been able to visit us is another story and, so far as I can see, we have never found any actual concrete evidence that alien beings have ever come here.
However, humans are graced (or cursed) with very active imaginations and stories about UFOs and other weird phenomena like the Loch Ness monster and the Sasquatch abound across all the human cultures on earth, despite the fact that nothing has ever been found to definitively prove any of their existences, like a body for example.
We seem to have a need to believe in things that don’t fit the natural world as we know it; it seems to be a part of what it is to be human.
The amount of response the story of the UFO at the CDH received is proof of that.
I think most of us want to believe it was real.
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