Night Shift Nurses and the Flying Saucer Men - part I
What sounds like a saucy, cinematic romp that would likely have played in some dingy theater on New York’s 42nd Street in the 1970s, is actually one of the strangest and most fascinating events in the long history of UFO research. The event in question, which would soon become a full blown phenomenon, began in the wee hours of New Year’s Day, 1970, and involved a group of Canadian nurses who would bear witness to a peculiar craft and a pair of bizarre beings that would forever alter the course of their lives.
At 11:59 pm. on New Year’s Eve, 1969, while the rest of British Columbia was engaged in celebrating the arrival of the new decade with hugs and kisses and copious amounts of champagne, a night shift nurse by the name of Doreen Kendall was punching in at Cowichan District Hospital on Vancouver Island for the midnight to eight swing.
There can be little doubt that following her tedious 26-mile commute from her home in Nanaimo, that she regretted having to miss all the festivities, but as she shucked her coat and resigned herself to the performance of her duties, Kendall had no way of knowing just how much excitement was in store for her and her co-workers occupying the second floor of the CDH’s East Wing.
NURSE KENDALL AND THE SAUCER PILOTS:
The dedicated practical nurse diligently made her rounds in the extended care unit for elderly patients with a registered nurse named Frieda Wilson, when, at approximately five in the morning, she noticed that one of her geriatric patients was stirring restlessly.
Assuming that her aged patient was simply too warm, Kendall pulled back the heavy drapes in the four bed room in order to allow a breeze into the ward. At the same time her supervisor attended to the patient on the other side of the privacy curtain near the doorway.
As soon as the nurse parted the drapes she was suddenly startled by a dazzling light, but once her eyes adjusted to the shine she spied something that would eternally adjust her perception of reality. Kendall described what she saw illuminating the hospital that early morn:
“Just as I pulled the drapes a brilliant light hit me in the eyes. It was still dark outside, but about 60-feet away, right above the children’s ward to my left, there was this object so big and bright I could see everything clearly.”
Kendall would go on to describe the unusual hovering object itself, which she claimed was slightly above her and approximately the width of five or six windows in the nearby children’s ward. This speculative measurement would put the diameter of his “Saturn-shaped” disc at about 50-feet. Kendall gave a detailed description of the vehicle:
“The object was circular and had what I guess you would call a top and 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 inside and I could see right into it.”
As if that weren’t bizarre enough, Kendall claimed that she could make out the shapes of two masculine, masked figures standing within the bubble atop the craft.
One of the “men” seemed to be positioned behind the other and appeared to be a little smaller than the closer one — although that might have been an issue of perspective. Both of these beings were, according to Kendall, facing to her right, looking away from the hospital. Kendall described the head gear clad, veiled, 6-foot tall humanoids in her own words:
“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.”
At this point Kendall observed that the odd craft was “tilting” toward her. As it leaned forward she spied two, knee-high, stool-like protrusions behind the entities and she also noticed what she described as an “instrument panel,” which looked as if it were made from a chrome-like metallic substance. The panel, which consumed almost half of the space inside the UFO and loomed up practically to the peak of the dome, was filled with small (presumably navigational) “circles” or dials of various sizes, all of which appeared to be illuminated from below.
Even more intriguingly, the larger being standing closest to the front of the transparent bubble seemed to have his attention consumed by the devices before him, forcing the nurse to speculate that they might be experiencing some kind of engine difficulty. Kendall would later ruminate that the reason she was so enthralled by this allegedly extraterrestrial technology was due to the fact that she came from a long line of racing-car aficionados and that she was always interested in automotive and other mechanical devices. According to Kendall:
“The man in front was staring at the panel as if something very important was going on, and I wondered if they might have had mechanical trouble. I even thought they might have landed on the roof of the hospital and then had trouble taking off… Maybe because I’m so mechanically minded, but I suspect they were having mechanical trouble and had stopped to make repairs.”
Interestingly, as this middle-aged nurse stood enthralled by this strange vessel floating before her, she would later claim that she had no sense of “fear” during her unusual encounter, only one of curiosity and calmness:
“I never felt so peaceful in all my life. I wish I could have talked to them… I was completely oblivious to anything else and felt no fear. In fact I would have loved to have gone for a ride and, if the men had spoken to me, I would have answered quite naturally.”
As if on cue — or perhaps by psychic connection — the smaller entity raised its head and slowly turned towards Kendall. Although his face was concealed, she felt as if this being were staring directly at her. Kendall described this harrowing interlude:
“He seemed to look right at me but I couldn’t see his face. It was covered by a darkish material that looked softer than the rest of his suit. I’m sure he saw me because then he touched the other man on the back… He was wearing a darkish fabric, similar to his uniform and headgear, which obscured his facial features.”
Once Kendall’s presence had been brought to the larger alien’s attention, he began engaging in what seemed to be evasive maneuvers. The entity reached down and grabbed what Kendall described as a “lever” with a ball on the top — which she would later compare to the “joy stick” of an airplane — that stuck out of the floor of the craft. Kendall described what she speculated to be the ufonauts effort to beat a hasty retreat:
“When he did this, the man 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 slowly, still close to the building, in an anti-clockwise direction.”
Kendall was so captivated by what she was seeing that she momentarily forgot about Wilson, who was still standing behind her. She was also afraid that these evidently shy creatures might hasten their departure even more if she made so much as a sound. It was then that Kendall silently waved her superior over to catch a glimpse of this astonishing vehicle, and its’ ostensibly unearthly occupants, before they disappeared:
“Then when I did think of it, I guess I hesitated. I felt I mustn’t make a noise or do anything that would break the trend of what was happening… I was so taken with the flying saucer that I didn’t call anyone. I felt mummified and fascinated and stood there for about five minutes watching before I called another nurse, Mrs. Freda Wilson. When it started to pull away, I realized no one would believe me and I ran and called Mrs. Wilson to come and look. She asked ‘what on earth it that?’ and I said ‘It’s a flying saucer.’”
Wilson later described the same event from her perspective:
“I noticed Miss Kendall standing at the window and wondered what she was looking at. In fact, I was just going to see when she beckoned to me, and then I saw this great big light over the patio outside the children’s ward. I’d say it was quite a bit larger than a car. It looked circular in shape and the far side seemed to be higher than the side near us. It was moving around slowly and then it started to move away. I didn’t really see any top or bottom to it. It was all just tremendously bright.”
At this point Kendall and Wilson sprinted down to the Nurse’s Station to corral their fellow nurses. Two of their understandably skeptical cohorts — Mrs. Appleby and Mrs. Clarkson — quickly followed them back into the room. The quartet of nurses rushed to the window, but by this point the hovering vehicle had moved far enough away from the hospital so that the allegedly extraterrestrial pilots were no longer visible, but the abnormal, self-illuminated object was still in plain sight.
Wilson confirmed Kendall’s assertion that the UFO was over five window panes in length and added that she saw a “red light” at the base. All of the nurses agreed that the spinning ship was completely silent.
The nurses watched as the disc-shaped craft slowly drifted off on a southeasterly course, disappearing behind the grove of trees bordering the facility just as two additional nurses arrived, missing the entire show. At this point one of the nurses — whose identity is surprisingly difficult to discern considering how well documented this case is — raced down the corridor and into a lavatory on the other side of the building and watched as the UFO rotated five times, then shot off “like a streak,”
As mind boggling as it is to have so many medical professionals observe an estimated 50-foot flying saucer gyrating over a hospital, there are some UFO skeptics who have pondered as to why Wilson (who was the second witness on the scene) did not also see the humanoids in the craft, and whether or not this is indicative of some sort of disingenuousness in Kendall’s account.
This seems ludicrous considering that there were three additional witnesses who were present to confirm the reality of the flying saucer whizzing around the hospital. Kendall, however, dismissed the skeptics’ doubts as a simple matter of timing:
“I think Mrs. Wilson must have come just a bit too late. After the thing circled four or five times, it started going away, farther along by the roof of the children’s ward, and I couldn’t see inside it either.”
Other researchers have pointed out that in the vast amount of “in flight” flying saucer sightings a large percentage of them seem to indicate that stationary — or hovering — UFOS seem to emit considerably less light than those in flight. Kendall was the only one of the four eyewitnesses to see the object before it began its revolutions. So, if the aforementioned hypothesis is true, then the excess illumination given off by the spinning disc might have obscured the pilots by the time Wilson and the others got to the window. This, of course, is pure speculation.
The Monday following this strange sighting, Kendall claimed that the experience had left her with no anxiety at all, just the same placid feeling she had felt during the encounter. She was also unruffled by what she knew would be the inevitable scoffing that would come from local skeptics and claimed that this event had only cemented her previously held belief in the existence UFOs:
“The reason I was so terrifically interested was because I always believed there were unidentified flying objects, but now I am absolutely convinced.”
Wilson, however, did not share Kendall’s belief in UFOs nor her easy going demeanor in the face of these unknown visitors. When she saw the abnormal aircraft all that rippled through her was sense of alarm and fear. It’s interesting to note the different interpretations that these women had to the same event.
Some researchers have theorized that Kendall’s relaxed demeanor in the face of such a fantastic encounter was due to the fact that she was overcome by some kind of hypnotic “wave” emanating from the ship that gave her a mild euphoric buzz which she described as a “tingling” sensation. Others hypothesize that it was the inherently “peaceful manner” of the two, masked ufonauts, along with her willingness to accept that alien life forms from out of this world might exist, that dissipated the apprehension that many feel Kendall ought to have experienced.
Kendall, wanting there to be an official record of this incredible incident, decided to record it in the hospital’s working schedule. This is the entry she jotted down following the event:
“At 5 a.m. I saw a flying saucer as low as the third floor of the hospital when I pulled the curtains. There were two men or figures in the dome flying towards Victoria. The bottom of the saucer was brilliantly lit and also the dome — New Year’s morning.”
A later reconstruction of proceedings would reveal that Kendall — who admitted to having a poor sense of direction — was mistaken when she suggested that the UFO had flown toward Victoria in her memo.
This, according to researchers, implied that the flying saucer headed south, when later sightings would confirm that it actually traveled in a northeasterly direction. Although it might just as easily have changed direction when it disappeared from the nurses’ view.
Despite Kendall’s poor directional judgment, she knew what she had seen was real and in the weeks following this odd episode she found that she had been profoundly affected by her encounter with these allegedly alien beings. Kendall explained how her visiting brother and co-workers noticed a difference in her behavior in the days following the incident:
“For at least a week after that I didn’t feel quite like my usual self. I think that normally I am an outgoing sort of person, but now I felt very subdued and some of the other nurses said I seemed preoccupied.”
Soon after, Kendall regained her composure, and hospital routines were quickly reestablished, but this would not be the last run-in that the good citizens of the Vancouver Island region would have with allegedly alien beings that wintery day.
CONFIRMATION AND CONTEXT:
As if the word of four professional caregivers would not be substantial enough to warrant serious debate for this case as being one of the most significant close encounters of the 20th Century, there would be other, completely unrelated, eyewitnesses that would seem to corroborate the fact that there was an anomalous object soaring in the skies above Vancouver island on January 1, 1970.
Before we delve any deeper, I think it warrants noting that these events happened over 40-years ago, long before the genesis of the current information age in which we are all entrenched. While word-of-mouth remains one of the most effective means of communication, it is by no means the swiftest and in the days before cell phones and the world wide web, information moved at a snail’s pace when compared to today.
So, as surprising as it may seem to us citizens of the 21st Century, news of this astonishing UFO encounter did not “officially” break until the following week, when the story was published in the Cowichan Herald on January 7, 1970, under the title “Another Saucer Sighted This Time Within 60 feet.” Surely information in the form of rumor and hearsay spread like a virus in an airplane, but most folks in the area wouldn’t even have their first inkling of these events for days. This fact would seem to make the plethora of eyewitnesses who came forward over the course of that eerie New Year’s Day all the more credible.
THE TRUCKER, HIS WIFE AND THE UFO
The first set of eyewitnesses to come forward before the tale of the nurses and the ufonauts hit the presses was a truck driver and his wife who were driving home following a rowdy New Years Eve celebration.
The husband — whose name is evidently in the official report on this case, but not on the public record — admitted to having had a few drinks at the party, but insisted that the experience he and his wife had with the UFO left him “cold sober.” He also felt the incident was of such significance that he was willing to reveal his illegal driving condition to researchers, which would seem to indicate just how sincere his testimony was.
According to their account, the married couple was driving home at approximately 5:00 am., which means that — assuming that we’re dealing with the same potentially interstellar device — their sighting occurred either directly before or directly after the encounter reported by the Nurses of the CDH. The trucker insisted that he and his wife had seen a brilliant white light, which he described as being “as big as a house” hovering just above their home. The eyewitnesses further elaborated that the object was ovoid and emitted multiple shafts of light, which pointed downward, uniting into a single shaft.
The couple later claimed that this convex shape made the UFO look like a child’s spinning top. The pair stared at this anomalous object for just a few moments before it abruptly soared skyward and disappeared from view. While conceding to being slightly buzzed, he emphasized the veracity of his and his wife’s account:
“I may have had a few drinks, but I know perfectly well that had nothing to do with what I saw, and my wife saw it, too.”
THE SCHOOL CREW SPIES A FLYING HULA HOOP
At this point the chronology of events gets a bit garbled, but when rifling through the accounts, it seems that this next alleged sighting occurred later that same morning, when a grade school aide named Edith Beiling — along with another aide, two students, a teacher and the school secretary — claimed to have seen an unusual airborne object above the Alexander Elementary School, where they all worked.
The group first saw the silently spinning, apparently ring-shaped UFO through the window of the grammar School. According to Beiling:
“We saw it through a window from inside the school at first, then we rushed outside to get a better look. We were all pretty excited, and I think there was one who was even quite frightened. I felt like ringing the school bell but decided I had better not… The ring definitely looked as if it was made of some solid substance. It was like a very large heavy hula hoop and the material looked like thick rolled-up plastic. It seemed to change in size slightly, perhaps because it was moving up and down, and we didn’t have any real idea what size it was but I’d say a large plane could have fitted into it about fifteen times.”
While Beiling was convinced that the object was “hula hoop” shaped, she did concede that it was an overcast day and it was therefore difficult to discern with complete assuredness if the gray center of the ship was a dull metal or merely the clouds poking through.
Regardless of whether or not the craft was ring-shaped — which may have been an illusion caused by the speedily spinning craft — the eyewitnesses all agreed that they were looking at a solid object and not some kind of cloud formation.
The sighting lasted approximately 3-minutes before the object disappeared from view. The rest of that New Year’s Day would prove to be a less eventful… that is, until the sun went down. That would be when one of the most noteworthy sightings in this shocking UFO flap would occur.
THE DRUMMOND ENCOUNTER
Established in 1860, and located approximately 10-miles away from the CDH, the quaint village of Mill Bay is nestled on the southeast shore of Vancouver Island and would serve as the site of what many believe to be the second most significant — and, in many ways, most alarming — encounter in this wave of anomalous airborne objects.
A 22 year-old nautical pilot and shipwright by the name of Jim Drummond had used his boat building expertise to convert an aged tugboat into a comfortable home, which he shared with his 18 year-old bride Dianne and their son. The boat was moored to a jetty adjacent to the home of Jim’s mother, Bea Drummond, whose house rested right on the shoreline of Mill Bay.
Bea would be the first to bear witness to this extraordinary, floating object when, at about 7 pm., when she walked out her back door to call in her son and his family in for New Year’s dinner. She described the beginning of this unusual event, which would prove to be every bit as bizarre as the nurses’ encounter from earlier that day:
“It was about seven o’clock and Jim and Dianna were still on the boat, anchored close to shore, when I went outside to call them in to dinner. Then I noticed a light in the sky moving over the bay. I couldn’t tell how big it was, it was so bright, and it had a yellow-orangey glow like sunlight. I got so excited I yelled to my son to look.”
Jim heard his mother’s excited screams and looked skyward. His eyes immediately registered the uncharacteristic object and he wasted no time in retrieving both his telescope and his camera from within the cabin.
He would later tell investigators that in the course of his job as a ship’s pilot he was accustomed to calculating the bearings of far-off objects, which is why he had confidence in the estimations he made regarding the strange flying object that evening. According to Jim:
“I looked up and saw this light coming in from the north, just about in line with our boat. It was skimming right under the overcast, which was about 900-feet. I ran into the cabin and grabbed my telescope and camera, and my wife came out with me to look. We were really excited.”
Sadly — though just as likely accurately — Jim surmised that the unconventional vessel would just look like a smudge of light against a sea of blackness, so he set down his the camera and began scrutinizing the UFO through his telescope. Jim described what he saw that chilly eve:
“It was sort of egg-shaped, in a vertical position, but the top and bottom were indistinct. It seemed to be transparent on top, and inside it I thought I could see a set of lights but I couldn’t really make out any details.”
With the exception of the “necklace” of lights, Jim’s description seems uncannily similar to the nurses. Bea, the justifiably concerned matriarch of the family, frantically urged her son to get his family off the boat and into the relative safety of her house.
Hoping to facilitate their passage over the dark pier, she flicked on the flood light attached to the back porch, filling the yard with light. This would appear to illicit an unexpected response from the UFO.
Without warning, the radiant, amber-ish object plummeted nearly 300-feet and began hovering between the house and the tugboat — effectively cutting off the younger Drummonds’ passage to the shore — but before either party could react, an even more alarming (and, according to the laws of physics, seemingly impossible) incident transpired. In Jim’s own words:
“Just at that point something came out of that thing, which by then had slowed down almost to a stop. It was a ray of light like a very thin neon tube, and it was in pieces, something like the dots and dashes of morse code. It came down in a curve and then it flashed right out, all of it at the same time. My hair just stood up on end. I couldn’t imagine anything like it.”
Just when it must have seemed that things were going to go from bad to worse, the object suddenly shot back up to its previous altitude, then soared southward and out of sight. On shore, Bea tried to follow the UFOs trajectory by dashing around her home, but to no avail. According to her account:
“I ran out to the other side of my house but I couldn’t see over the trees. I tried to phone some of the neighbors but I couldn’t get through on the party line.”
Jim continued to watch the vehicle’s departure through his telescope, marveling at the curious structure. Later he would testify that he was positive that it was not a conventional aircraft due to its irregular shape and lack of colored navigational lights or any sound . According to Jim:
“It was brighter in the middle and I could see four distinct lights of the same color that looked like tips of candles only a bit bigger. I have never heard of anything that could maneuver that slow and fast without making some sort of noise.”
When the nurses’ account was printed in the Cowichan Leader the next week it was accompanied by a smaller article simply titled “Second Sighting.” Nevertheless, according to Bea’s daughter — and Jim’s sister — Fran Drummond, her mother was reticent to even speak of the event up until her death in 2007, for fear of being labeled as a “nut.”
Sadly, such is the curse that befalls far too many who bear witness to a fascinating, yet — at least by current scientific standards — unclassifiable event and have the courage to speak out about it. One can’t help but to wonder how many other potential witnesses to these (and similar) events remained tragically silent for just that very reason.
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