561 segments
Speaking specifically about the Guardian case, it's just such a hall of mirrors.
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This individual, the mysterious individual calling himself Guardian, putting his thumbprint
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on this tape and then mailing them out anonymously, it was like a movie.
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It took place near Ottawa.
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As a Canadian boy, this stuff never happened locally, so I thought this was something that
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I could actually check out on my own if I want.
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There's been sort of a resurgence and an interest in UFOs and uphology.
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The government has been releasing information to show that they're still interested in
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still tracking UFOs.
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The one thing that I've never really been able to process myself about this case was that
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there were other people in West Carlton who claimed to have been seeing things during
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I still have questions.
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I would love to know what was in my backyard.
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Why did I see that light in my room?
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And that's still a mystery to me.
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And this whole case still is.
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I mean, 30 years later, we still don't know.
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Well, I've known about the Guardian case as long as I can remember, my Nana Susan Gill,
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I guess had a lot more to do with it than I thought.
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It definitely did seem like that there was a verifiable phenomenon, a genuine phenomenon
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happening in that area during that period of time of 89 to 91.
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I've never thought we were the only ones in the universe, maybe on Earth, but even now
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I start to question that.
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But you don't know what to believe.
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In 1989, UFO investigators started receiving material from an individual who called himself
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And the original material that was sent consisted of typewritten reports and photographs and
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maps of the Carp West Carlton area concerning UFO activity.
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Because the photographs were very blurry, the UFO investigators didn't give a lot of
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credence to Guardian's material at that time.
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October of 1991, Guardian starts sending up more material again.
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Nissan or even Abram does not protect that type of article.
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A photographer named RJ Betonhoe who was told to última credentials on 27 of July
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after eight years of leave.
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I think one of the things that is
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was telling was they read like science fiction.
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Canadian and American security agencies are engaged in a conspiracy of silence.
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To withhold from the world, the alien vessel seized in the swamps of Corcorri road carp in
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The ship had landed in deep swamp near Corcorri road.
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The new A-H-64 Apache's and a U-H-60 Black Hawk headed for the area the following night.
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They were part of a covert American unit that specialized in the recovery of alien craft.
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No smoke screen was needed for the military activity, as Canadian forces regularly train
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With the ship captured, the United States Air Force pentagon and office of naval intelligence
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The UFO parts were transported to a secret facility in Canada, Ontario.
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How exciting would it be if in all places like the farmland and the swampland of West
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Carlton, a UFO crashed and you've got American and Canadian government forces teaming up
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to collect this material and study it?
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It really is like a fictional story come true.
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The culmination in these packages is a VHS tape.
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The videotape is just a few minutes long and shows what's purport to be a landed UFO in
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a field next to four red burning flares.
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The event in the videotape was said to have taken place in August 1991.
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So it was about six months after the alleged event that the videotapes started circulating
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to UFO investigators around the world.
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He sent it to, again, the Canadian investigators, Mufon Ontario, Mufon in the United States
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and he also sent a package to Bob Exler.
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The Mutual UFO network has an Ontario branch and they've been investigating guardians since
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Bob Exler was an American UFO investigator who sometimes worked with Mufon.
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I'm Bob Exler, a former NASA mission specialist and an investigation analyst.
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Now what you're about to see involves the results of a year-long investigation that
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started in February of 1993 with the receipt of a very unusual yet extraordinary videotape
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of a landed UFO craft just about 30 miles outside of the city of Ottawa and Ontario, Canada.
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The events depicted in the Guardian video were alleged to have taken place in an area
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of southern Ontario called West Carlton.
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It was a brand new subdivision of executive homes built on two-acre lots.
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It was somewhat flat but empty.
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There was not a lot of homes you could see for a long way.
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There was nothing around us.
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It was one of the wealthier communities in that region just because of its proximity
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to the city and its ability for people to commute into good jobs.
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There's a lot of green space out there which is one reason that people love it so much.
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Everybody kind of knows everybody's business.
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Even when you move into the community, people know who you are and where you came from pretty
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It's tight-knit people look out for each other.
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There is a lot of military.
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There's a base not too far from here.
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I don't know how active the base is now.
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But they carry out operations there of some sorts of nature or whatever they do.
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There seems to be a lot of people who see stuff around the area but they don't really know
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I've heard from numerous neighbors that they've seen crafts, UFOs and whatnot.
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They could never fully identify anything.
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I think anytime someone brings up UFOs or anything in any context, we both immediately jump
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to, oh yeah, that UFO landing in carp in the 80s and 90s.
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That was in our backyard.
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That's our immediate response to that.
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Now that you've seen the basic evidence associated with this extraordinary landing case,
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what we are attempting to do is to put together a full length, one hour documentary for broadcast.
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We are hoping to get on camera interviews with the witnesses and wrapping it up from there.
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Okay, so I'm Lois Tuffin.
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I'm a former reporter at the Almont Gazette that covered this crazy story.
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Bob X, we're walking into my office and said, hey, we got this thing going on and we want
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to talk to you about it.
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We want to get some publicity.
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We want to get some more answers so we want to turn to the community and get more input.
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Bob decided that the best way to flesh out Guardian was through some major TV coverage
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with connections that he had with the Unsolved Mysteries program.
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He contacted them and they agreed to come and shoot in the West Carlton area and do a segment
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on the Guardian case.
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The key to the entire episode lies with a person using the name Guardian, the presence of this
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mysterious informant in Ramote Field late at night with video camera in hand just in
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time for a UFO sighting can hardly be ascribed to luck.
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The majority of the shoot was at the Firehouse where supposedly the event took place.
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I was at college in 1992 and the fall was in the second year of a television broadcasting
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program when my teacher had been contacted by somebody from Los Angeles that she knew
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and was looking for some extra help on a shoot that was going to be happening in Ottawa
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When we found out it was Unsolved Mysteries, we sort of went, yeah, okay.
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While on the film shoots, I was what's called a production assistant.
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So whatever had to be done, lugging table, sweeping snow off rocks, fixing holes and walls
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that were left by the film crew, that sort of thing.
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I didn't know anything about the content of the show before we got involved and I found
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that it was actually this UFO story that had happened a couple of years before in
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Karp and my buddy and I were like, oh, this is kind of fun.
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We're going to be shooting some UFO stuff, okay.
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Looking back at Bob specifically, he was very much wanting to be involved in all aspects
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of the shoot itself.
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He wanted to be interviewed more and more and go on about the details of this particular
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So yeah, I would consider him more of a personality in front of the camera as opposed to a scientist.
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Even the reenacting of the guardian thing is Bob's hands doing all that stuff which I thought
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I certainly left with an indelible impression that he had an agenda.
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He wanted to be in control of the way the media was shaping the narrative of the guardian
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I have vague memories of him talking about other events that he was involved with and
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how this particular one, Guardian, you know, being in his mind, thinking it was a whistleblower
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from the Canadian military.
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Having no contact with Guardian is probably the biggest frustration to an investigation
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We don't know who Guardian is.
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We don't know if Guardian was sent or went on his own.
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I believe I watched the unsolved mysteries probably at least 10 years ago at some point
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And it was kind of like, okay, that's cool.
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Yeah, that was in our backyard.
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Was there a real event?
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And, you know, we were witnesses to it.
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We do wonder what did happen back then.
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We don't know who the Guardian is.
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We just know that things happen at the same time.
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So whatever happened, that stuff happened in our backyard and we were just kids.
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The community that we lived in was Cedar Ridge States in West Carlton.
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And our bedroom windows were on the second floor of the house, which faced onto two and
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a half acres of just trees and brush.
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And a very bright light shone into my second story bedroom window.
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The light was white.
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And I couldn't see what the source of that light was.
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I also didn't hear anything.
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My first thought for whatever reason was, oh, it's a car going by.
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And then I immediately thought, wait, that's impossible.
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Something whatever it was was able to shine a light that bright directly into my bedroom
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on the second floor of a house without making any sound.
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It had to have been relatively close to shine.
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And then I went to the window.
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And then something was gone.
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I looked in our backyard.
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I couldn't hear or see anything.
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I wasn't feeling fear, like not fear for my life.
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But I knew this is something very unusual.
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This memory has stayed with me very, very vividly all this time, simply because it's just
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one of the strangest things that ever happened to me in my life that I always wondered what
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I still have questions.
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I would love to know what was in my backyard.
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Why did I see that light in my room?
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And that's still a mystery to me.
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And this whole case still is.
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I mean, 30 years later we still don't know who the guardian is.
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I think the reason why the guardian case endures 30 years later is because it was always
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a compelling mystery and it never really had an answer.
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So the first thing that I did in my investigation was I gathered everything that had been done
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I'm recording the segments on TV.
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I'm collecting the names that are involved.
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And of course the name that keeps popping up over and over again is Bob Axler.
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He seems to be the lead investigator on this.
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So I got Bob Axler's contact information in Maryland and called him.
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That's what happened.
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I just inserted myself into this case.
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And the fact that it was only happening a couple hours from my house, I couldn't help
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and want to get involved.
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I wanted to check this out.
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I even have a bunch of old photos that we took back then.
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No digital photos in that time.
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You take the picture and then you have to wait to see if they turn down later on.
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These pictures that we took of Almont, the house where Guardian, where the UFO allegedly
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This was winter too.
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So I mean it was, we were driving around a little 94 Honda Civic car actually got stuck
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I fell into a ditch.
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In my molder trench coat.
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You have to remember when I was investigating this case, I was 16, 17 years old.
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So for me, it was to even get up to the site.
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I had to borrow my mom's car.
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No one would do it on weekends because I'm in school at the time, right?
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So I'm going through, tromping through the snow, the backwoods of West Carlton with a video
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In my molder trench coat, trying to find under three feet of snow where a UFO landed in
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a videotape that I saw on unsolved mysteries.
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I felt so excited at the onset.
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I'm going to this town as an investigator, talking to the witnesses.
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And even from a skeptical point of view like myself, you can't help but believe some
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It was something that I was always very cognizant of when I was speaking to witnesses was no
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You just, you're there to collect the story.
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There's a, there's a psychology to UFOs and belief that for me was as compelling as
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the mystery itself, but whether or not aliens were even landing here, you want to understand
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what was happening in carp as much as I want to understand what was happening in Guardians
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I wanted to know why he did it.
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We're still trying to figure that out.
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Almost 30 years later, we're still trying to, to, to understand why he did what he did.
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So the following February, February of 1993, the unsolved mystery segment errors.
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Now Guardian is, I guess you almost say in the pop culture.
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It's the world now knows about the Guardian case.
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And it starts to generate more leads in the area, more witnesses to UFO activity in the
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Our investigation continued following the unsolved mysteries production.
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We found two eyewitnesses, adult eyewitnesses who observed the event that night in August
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Bob Exler shows up at our doorstep and he's looking for somebody who wrote this letter to him.
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They have detailed information he wants to talk to them.
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And as I wrote through it, I went, oh, this sounds like my neighbor Susan down the
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He says, yeah, because she's the only one on the street with two dogs and lives by herself.
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So he says, oh, really?
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Can you show me where she lives?
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So I said, okay, yeah.
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So I proceeded and went with him and showed him her residence.
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And that's where he went.
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From her front window, you could see right into the spot where the Guardian event was alleged
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to have been filmed.
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So my grandmother lived alone.
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She moved here in the summer of 1987.
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She lived here until the spring of 2018 when she passed away.
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She saw the episode on unsolved mysteries on television and had contacted Bob Exler,
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just saying that she had information regarding the Guardian case.
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She's a very firm believer that UFOs existed and that these things happened.
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So I felt that it's what could be the arm and actually just saying what happened here.
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So my grandmother was sitting down on her couch in her living room watching her television
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programs for the evening.
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Her dog that she had at the time, Shiba, had started barking.
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A lording her to something going on in the neighborhood.
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So she looked out the window and she saw lights emanating from the trees towards the
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Lights that were spinning in a counterclockwise direction and then it rose and took off
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really fast and just disappeared into like a little blink.
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And then on her way driving to work that morning, she saw military trucks with armed soldiers
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pulling up all down on road and heading towards her house while she was on her way out
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to getting to work the next morning.
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That was the story that I grew up with knowing and then the Guardian case airing on unsolved
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mysteries and finding out later that she had something to do with with with those incidents.
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When I was investigating the case, what I knew about Susan was that she was a witness
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that Bob Exler had located who was able to corroborate the events in the Guardian film.
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She claimed that she was abducted by the UFO and had seen the alien entities that are
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also seen and still images on the tape.
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So the next show Bob appears on is encounters and he gets Susan Gail to appear on camera.
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One witness came forward with a detailed description of her encounter.
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She requested that we hide her identity because of possible repercussions that her testimony
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Well, I saw a light emanating up from behind the tree line.
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She doesn't want her identity revealed because she's worried about repercussions from her
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Susan worked for external affairs and she didn't want to suffer any repercussions from her
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job, which is why she used a pseudonym.
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But for Bob, this was just something else he could add to his narrative by saying that
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she had a sensitive government job.
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It goes into his story that there was a government conspiracy involved.
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I saw somebody come out of the side, upper half of the craft, the skin of the person,
[0:22:38 - 0:22:46] ▶
I'll call the person for now, had a glow to it.
[0:22:46 - 0:22:51] ▶
That's how she talked.
[0:22:52 - 0:22:54] ▶
That's how I could see features.
[0:22:54 - 0:22:58] ▶
That's the way she spoke.
[0:22:59 - 0:23:00] ▶
She's a very firm believer that UFOs existed.
[0:23:00 - 0:23:05] ▶
My grandmother knew how to use computers, how to use technology, especially working
[0:23:05 - 0:23:15] ▶
with the government.
[0:23:15 - 0:23:16] ▶
I know she owned a typewriter.
[0:23:16 - 0:23:18] ▶
I know she was working with Bob and I know she was trying to get to the bottom of what
[0:23:18 - 0:23:22] ▶
I do remember that she didn't like the way that he was conducting his business or he
[0:23:24 - 0:23:31] ▶
didn't like the way that he was conducting his interviews or finding information.
[0:23:31 - 0:23:35] ▶
There was some talk among the Canadian investigators that the American investigators clearly had
[0:23:35 - 0:23:41] ▶
a monetary interest in the case.
[0:23:41 - 0:23:43] ▶
They really wanted to sort of brand it and make it their own.
[0:23:43 - 0:23:47] ▶
A lot of times when there's a very popular case, an investigator will want to own it.
[0:23:47 - 0:23:53] ▶
They want to own everything about it.
[0:23:53 - 0:23:55] ▶
If the media is going to talk, they're only going to talk to me.
[0:23:55 - 0:23:59] ▶
It's a very territorial thing that I've seen in a lot of cases and was having very first
[0:23:59 - 0:24:04] ▶
hand knowledge of with Bob Exler in this case.
[0:24:04 - 0:24:09] ▶
And I think that Exler and his crew really wanted an answer.
[0:24:09 - 0:24:13] ▶
They really wanted to nail this and then go back to their lives.
[0:24:13 - 0:24:18] ▶
It took no time to gather a group of local towns people who claimed to have witnessed
[0:24:18 - 0:24:22] ▶
Most were eager to cooperate.
[0:24:24 - 0:24:25] ▶
After Bob showed them the guardian tape, each one shared their version of the experience.
[0:24:25 - 0:24:31] ▶
I thought I had seen some strobing within the light.
[0:24:31 - 0:24:34] ▶
At that point, it started coming down and at us.
[0:24:34 - 0:24:37] ▶
They had actually called me a witness to the guardian landing in the documentary, which
[0:24:37 - 0:24:44] ▶
was totally broke false.
[0:24:44 - 0:24:49] ▶
My sighting had happened almost three years later.
[0:24:49 - 0:24:53] ▶
I believe the guardian was 1989 and my sighting was 1993.
[0:24:53 - 0:24:58] ▶
It was, I believe, December 3rd or 4th, 1993.
[0:25:01 - 0:25:24] ▶
I was coming home from my son's karate lesson and he was in the car with me.
[0:25:24 - 0:25:30] ▶
I turned onto my street.
[0:25:30 - 0:25:53] ▶
And there was these stadium lights above the road.
[0:25:53 - 0:25:59] ▶
And I thought there's got to be an explanation.
[0:25:59 - 0:26:02] ▶
This is something, you know, it'll be a helicopter.
[0:26:02 - 0:26:08] ▶
It looked like maybe the width of a house, maybe 50 yards, above the road.
[0:26:08 - 0:26:16] ▶
And what struck me was the dead silence.
[0:26:16 - 0:26:19] ▶
There was not a sound.
[0:26:21 - 0:26:23] ▶
It was more than a few seconds.
[0:26:23 - 0:26:24] ▶
It was like 15 to 20 minutes.
[0:26:24 - 0:26:38] ▶
The irony of what Bob does by trying to combine these things into one case is that it actually
[0:26:38 - 0:26:45] ▶
damages the credibility of the larger phenomena that there was possibly something happening
[0:26:45 - 0:26:51] ▶
By having all of these things trying to piggyback on his guardian narrative, it ends up destroying
[0:26:54 - 0:27:00] ▶
any credibility he might have actually had with legitimate witnesses.
[0:27:00 - 0:27:07] ▶
The whole guardian situation we didn't know until later on when it started getting local
[0:27:07 - 0:27:12] ▶
And without a case, so this is kind of a hot spot for this type of thing.
[0:27:13 - 0:27:17] ▶
We're not the only ones that have seen something strange like this.
[0:27:17 - 0:27:19] ▶
So it kind of comfort us to know that there's other people seeing this type of thing.
[0:27:19 - 0:27:39] ▶
This incident happened in the summer of 1991 and it was July or August.
[0:27:39 - 0:27:46] ▶
Kirk was on an afternoon shift and I was home alone.
[0:27:46 - 0:28:00] ▶
It was around 9, 9, 30, 10 o'clock.
[0:28:00 - 0:28:03] ▶
I put my son to bed.
[0:28:03 - 0:28:10] ▶
I was just learning to head up to bed and all of a sudden all the lights went on in the
[0:28:10 - 0:28:20] ▶
It was lit up and it was very bright.
[0:28:21 - 0:28:36] ▶
It just felt like a moment there stood still for a while.
[0:28:36 - 0:28:42] ▶
I went to the window to see if there was any noise outside or anything.
[0:28:46 - 0:28:49] ▶
I can see a car or anything.
[0:28:49 - 0:28:53] ▶
And there was nothing.
[0:28:53 - 0:28:55] ▶
And I had the phone.
[0:28:55 - 0:28:58] ▶
I phoned my husband, telling him what was happening.
[0:28:58 - 0:29:00] ▶
My first reaction is okay.
[0:29:09 - 0:29:11] ▶
It was a scary, scary moment.
[0:29:16 - 0:29:20] ▶
Well, the next day we decided to go for a walk down our laneway and we came to the end
[0:29:20 - 0:29:29] ▶
And all of a sudden, the helicopter landed in the field in front of our property.
[0:29:31 - 0:29:39] ▶
There was at least four people jumped out of the helicopter.
[0:29:39 - 0:29:43] ▶
They got out of the helicopter and they started screwing around the area that they had
[0:29:43 - 0:29:47] ▶
And they were running in the area pretty frantically.
[0:29:49 - 0:29:54] ▶
They lasted about a minute and they got back into the helicopter and it took off.
[0:29:54 - 0:30:02] ▶
I've never seen anything like that in my life.
[0:30:03 - 0:30:05] ▶
Like actually, if it lasted a little longer, I would have called the police.
[0:30:06 - 0:30:10] ▶
But it was so fast they ran it out and gone.
[0:30:10 - 0:30:14] ▶
The general consensus from the people in West Carlton, they sort of fell into three groups.
[0:30:14 - 0:30:19] ▶
There was people who believed it was an out and out hoax.
[0:30:19 - 0:30:23] ▶
It was just done for publicity.
[0:30:23 - 0:30:24] ▶
There were people that felt it was absolutely UFOs.
[0:30:24 - 0:30:27] ▶
These were people who were hardcore believers of not just UFOs, but all kinds of paranormal
[0:30:27 - 0:30:31] ▶
And then there was a third group that felt it was just a videotape of military maneuvers
[0:30:33 - 0:30:38] ▶
that had already been seen by many locals of taking place in that area due to the nearby
[0:30:38 - 0:30:43] ▶
All kinds of reports of military helicopters performing exercises, night maneuvers with
[0:30:48 - 0:30:53] ▶
One of the components of a conspiracy beliefs that we've noticed in UFO cases is belief in
[0:30:57 - 0:31:05] ▶
sort of the grand conspiracy that the aliens are here, the government is covering it up.
[0:31:05 - 0:31:14] ▶
There's also a popular notion that UFOs themselves are drawn to military sites.
[0:31:14 - 0:31:20] ▶
And Ottawa being the seat of Canadian government, it's not a coincidence that there have been
[0:31:20 - 0:31:24] ▶
a number of UFO sightings in the Ottawa area.
[0:31:24 - 0:31:28] ▶
You would think that if there was something to the phenomenon and that they were investigating
[0:31:28 - 0:31:33] ▶
humanity, these are the locations that they would be exploring.
[0:31:33 - 0:31:42] ▶
So why are they here?
[0:31:42 - 0:31:43] ▶
That's another good question.
[0:31:43 - 0:31:45] ▶
It's just this area seems to be a hot spot for them and we're not sure because they always
[0:31:47 - 0:31:54] ▶
they seem to always come straight in from the west and from where I have no idea.
[0:31:54 - 0:32:03] ▶
In my mind there's something more going on that we're not being told and governments
[0:32:03 - 0:32:08] ▶
are not telling us the truth about a lot of stuff.
[0:32:08 - 0:32:12] ▶
I had always thought that the deepened bunker, which is where we are right now, was maybe
[0:32:12 - 0:32:17] ▶
what attracted whatever to us.
[0:32:17 - 0:32:29] ▶
This was a working base when I first moved here.
[0:32:29 - 0:32:34] ▶
350 people worked below ground at all time.
[0:32:34 - 0:32:37] ▶
They had a radio station, television station.
[0:32:37 - 0:32:42] ▶
They had communications that could reach any country in the world.
[0:32:42 - 0:32:46] ▶
It was where government was supposed to go if there was nuclear blast.
[0:32:46 - 0:32:53] ▶
And they would have everything they needed to communicate with the rest of the world.
[0:32:53 - 0:33:00] ▶
So maybe that was what was attracting them.
[0:33:00 - 0:33:02] ▶
I mean they thought they could communicate here.
[0:33:02 - 0:33:08] ▶
I have no doubt that they have visited the deepened bunker site, which is absolutely fascinating.
[0:33:08 - 0:33:22] ▶
These were built across the nations, there are many of them in my opinion.
[0:33:22 - 0:33:28] ▶
They visited every atomic installation of every country in the world and taken an inventory
[0:33:28 - 0:33:32] ▶
And they're petrified that we're going to blow ourselves up.
[0:33:34 - 0:33:39] ▶
The children are playing with matches.
[0:33:39 - 0:33:42] ▶
And I think that the visitors want to know all about our military capability, our ability
[0:33:42 - 0:33:50] ▶
But decommissioned in 1994.
[0:33:57 - 0:34:02] ▶
And for me, things seemed to slow down about then.
[0:34:02 - 0:34:06] ▶
So then I really started to wonder whether this had something to do with why there were
[0:34:06 - 0:34:10] ▶
so many sightings in this area.
[0:34:10 - 0:34:13] ▶
And maybe they've moved on now.
[0:34:13 - 0:34:15] ▶
In my mind, a UFO case is never really closed because it never ends with someone finding
[0:34:15 - 0:34:23] ▶
a UFO or an alien body.
[0:34:23 - 0:34:27] ▶
No case to date anyway.
[0:34:27 - 0:34:29] ▶
It always ends with, well, it could have been this or it could have been that, but we don't
[0:34:29 - 0:34:33] ▶
It's kind of frustrating in that way.
[0:34:35 - 0:34:36] ▶
I think that's the reason why a lot of investigators burn out.
[0:34:36 - 0:34:39] ▶
You can only take so much before you just get fed up and you quit.
[0:34:39 - 0:34:47] ▶
One of the last things Bob did as a UFO investigator was send out a letter, essentially a resignation.
[0:34:47 - 0:34:53] ▶
He was done with the UFO field.
[0:34:54 - 0:34:58] ▶
He was going to write a book on the Guardian case that was supposedly going to set the
[0:34:58 - 0:35:00] ▶
record straight and was going to vilify the Canadians and would show that he had been
[0:35:00 - 0:35:06] ▶
And of course, the book never materialized.
[0:35:07 - 0:35:09] ▶
And Bob was never heard from again in Eufology.
[0:35:09 - 0:35:19] ▶
For all the questions that you ask, all the people that you meet, all of the pavement
[0:35:19 - 0:35:23] ▶
that you pound, there were just no answers.
[0:35:23 - 0:35:27] ▶
No satisfying conclusion that you could just wrap it up in a bow and say, here, this is
[0:35:27 - 0:35:32] ▶
the answer to the Guardian case.
[0:35:32 - 0:35:36] ▶
It's the double-edged sort of a mystery.
[0:35:36 - 0:35:38] ▶
It's the mystery that compels you, but it's the lack of answers that frustrate you.
[0:35:38 - 0:35:47] ▶
I knew very early on I wasn't going to have a future as a UFO investigator because there
[0:35:47 - 0:35:51] ▶
was never any answers, never any satisfying answers.
[0:35:51 - 0:35:56] ▶
It was a natural progression for me to move into fiction and start writing horror and science
[0:35:56 - 0:36:01] ▶
It only made sense for me to get into fiction because at least these are stories I could
[0:36:02 - 0:36:06] ▶
write that have endings.
[0:36:06 - 0:36:10] ▶
Writing a book about UFOs, like the Guardian case, was never going to be something I could
[0:36:10 - 0:36:15] ▶
do because it has no ending.
[0:36:15 - 0:36:16] ▶
There's no third act of a Guardian book.
[0:36:16 - 0:36:22] ▶
When I looked back at myself 30 years ago as a teenage UFO investigator and I tried to
[0:36:22 - 0:36:28] ▶
figure out how I became this writer of fiction today, I think it was really just, it was
[0:36:28 - 0:36:37] ▶
a moment in my time.
[0:36:37 - 0:36:38] ▶
It was, it was a lot of things came together.
[0:36:38 - 0:36:40] ▶
It was my interest in the supernatural ghost stories and UFOs.
[0:36:40 - 0:36:50] ▶
The one thing that I've never really been able to process myself about this case was that
[0:36:50 - 0:36:56] ▶
there were other people in West Carlton who claimed to have been seeing things during that
[0:36:56 - 0:37:00] ▶
It definitely did seem like that there was a verifiable phenomenon, a genuine phenomenon
[0:37:02 - 0:37:07] ▶
happening in that area during that period of time.
[0:37:07 - 0:37:12] ▶
Belief is a very powerful thing and it's a very personal thing.
[0:37:12 - 0:37:16] ▶
So when you're telling someone what you shouldn't believe this because it's a hoax, if they
[0:37:16 - 0:37:20] ▶
believe it's true, you're almost attacking like a core belief system.
[0:37:20 - 0:37:25] ▶
People will believe what they want to believe.
[0:37:25 - 0:37:29] ▶
To be honest, I have no idea.
[0:37:34 - 0:37:38] ▶
Part of me wants to believe it was something that there was an explanation for and part
[0:37:38 - 0:37:43] ▶
I've never believed that we were the only ones in the universe that's, I think, too far
[0:37:44 - 0:37:50] ▶
Was it fabricated or was it just twisted?
[0:37:52 - 0:37:56] ▶
I believe in some truths and activity I do.
[0:37:57 - 0:38:00] ▶
From the amount of people I've spoken to who all live out here that see things, I believe
[0:38:00 - 0:38:05] ▶
there's some truth to activity, to stuff happening.
[0:38:05 - 0:38:09] ▶
What happened with this fire and this purported crash and this guardian tape, was that a hoax?
[0:38:09 - 0:38:14] ▶
Maybe, maybe it was.
[0:38:14 - 0:38:16] ▶
And we happened to see that hoax actually play out from our bedrooms back when we were
[0:38:16 - 0:38:20] ▶
Anybody can buy a videotape.
[0:38:21 - 0:38:23] ▶
Anybody could have been out there that night.
[0:38:23 - 0:38:25] ▶
So it's hard to say who it was.
[0:38:25 - 0:38:27] ▶
I don't know who it was and I think most people don't know who it is.
[0:38:27 - 0:38:32] ▶
It would be interesting that that person decided to kind of solve that mystery for us all
[0:38:32 - 0:38:36] ▶
and we could all move on.
[0:38:36 - 0:38:38] ▶
But I'm not using any sleep over it.
[0:38:38 - 0:38:41] ▶
I grew up on the ex files.
[0:38:41 - 0:38:42] ▶
But I have a really hard time believing that creatures from another planet or galaxy or
[0:38:45 - 0:38:50] ▶
wherever have come here to a steal our children, be mutilated or gouged or see, look
[0:38:50 - 0:38:57] ▶
up, be grainy on video camera just enough to make us question what we're looking at.
[0:38:57 - 0:39:03] ▶
I think it's a bit silly, personally.
[0:39:03 - 0:39:05] ▶
But I do believe that there are other life out there.
[0:39:05 - 0:39:08] ▶
And I think it's inevitable that we will contact them, just nodding somebody's back
[0:39:08 - 0:39:13] ▶
here and it'll curb.
[0:39:13 - 0:39:15] ▶
Oh man, like I even mean, like I'm skeptical of it sometimes.
[0:39:15 - 0:39:18] ▶
Like I asked myself, did this happen?
[0:39:18 - 0:39:21] ▶
Was she just imagining it?
[0:39:25 - 0:39:27] ▶
And the way in which she would explain this was such conviction was that it just happened.
[0:39:29 - 0:39:39] ▶
And I think what she would say, de-skeptics out there or people that would say like, yeah,
[0:39:39 - 0:39:52] ▶
this isn't real or maybe you made it up or maybe you dreamt it.
[0:39:52 - 0:39:56] ▶
She would say, you'll find out one day.
[0:39:57 - 0:40:00] ▶
Like it was kind of what she seemed to say.
[0:40:00 - 0:40:02] ▶
Like it was that we'll all know the answer one day.
[0:40:02 - 0:40:05] ▶
There was an envelope that was left with my grandmother's things that said, do not open unless something happens to me.
[0:40:19 - 0:40:25] ▶
After she passed away, we were so connected and really close growing up that I was nervous
[0:40:26 - 0:40:34] ▶
reading those documents because I didn't know what I'd find in there.
[0:40:34 - 0:40:39] ▶
I had decided that now's the time, I guess, to open it up and take a look.
[0:40:47 - 0:40:54] ▶
There are specific sections and documents that refer to Guardian.
[0:40:56 - 0:41:08] ▶
When I started reading about the Guardian cases, yeah, it was like completely overtaken.
[0:41:08 - 0:41:16] ▶
It was just like reading it was like so surreal.
[0:41:16 - 0:41:20] ▶
It was like, there's no way that this can be real.
[0:41:20 - 0:41:23] ▶
You think about these things in sci-fi and then all of a sudden your family member has written
[0:41:27 - 0:41:33] ▶
recollections of all these things that we see on TV that seems like fantasy, but I guess it's not.
[0:41:33 - 0:41:41] ▶
The UFO sighting August 18, 1991 on the Labanx property.
[0:41:57 - 0:42:03] ▶
That evening I started watching television earlier in the evening.
[0:42:10 - 0:42:14] ▶
I don't recall the 9 p.m. show ending or the 10 p.m. show starting.
[0:42:14 - 0:42:19] ▶
All I can remember is walking down the road onto the Labanx property where the craft was.
[0:42:19 - 0:42:25] ▶
The next thing I recall is standing there watching them come out of the woods and boarding the craft.
[0:42:27 - 0:42:34] ▶
The next thing I knew I was back on the couch and the 10 p.m. show was well underway.
[0:42:34 - 0:42:40] ▶
The next thing that happened was my dog Shiba, alerting me to something going on outside.
[0:42:40 - 0:42:46] ▶
I went to the living room window and saw a light rising up into the sky swirling very quickly in a counterclockwise motion.
[0:42:46 - 0:42:55] ▶
Then it quickly shot up into the sky and then the flash was gone.
[0:42:56 - 0:42:59] ▶
My grandmother, at this point, I had thought that she had only had something to do on the sidelines of it.
[0:43:05 - 0:43:10] ▶
But right here is where she describes that.
[0:43:10 - 0:43:14] ▶
It literally describes what was in the tape.
[0:43:14 - 0:43:17] ▶
Do you think your grandmother was guardian?
[0:43:17 - 0:43:20] ▶
Or do you think she was recording the videotape?
[0:43:20 - 0:43:24] ▶
I can't definitively say yes or no.
[0:43:28 - 0:43:31] ▶
I want to, but I can't definitively say whether it was her or not.
[0:43:34 - 0:43:40] ▶
There's no evidence that says I took this videotape.
[0:43:40 - 0:43:45] ▶
You know, there's no evidence that says she was guardian.
[0:43:45 - 0:43:50] ▶
I think the reason why we're so interested in the idea of UFOs and life from beyond visiting the Earth now is because it makes us feel less alone.
[0:44:25 - 0:44:38] ▶
We're a species on the only habitable planet in this solar system.
[0:44:38 - 0:44:43] ▶
We know the math. We know the science. There is life out there in the universe.
[0:44:43 - 0:44:49] ▶
Whether or not we will ever encounter that life in our lifetime, who knows?
[0:44:50 - 0:44:56] ▶
That's part of the mystery.
[0:44:56 - 0:44:58] ▶
But we want it. We want to believe.
[0:44:58 - 0:45:02] ▶
So even if you don't believe that they're visiting right now, you would believe or you would want to believe that there is life out there, that the capacity for aliens existing somewhere and hopefully visiting us one day or us visiting them is the same.
[0:45:02 - 0:45:18] ▶
It makes us feel less alone and then something tangible, something that could be true.
[0:45:18 - 0:45:24] ▶
It just makes the universe a little bit smaller, you know, it makes that darkness a little less dark.
[0:45:24 - 0:45:33] ▶
I guess we're like of a better term.
[0:45:33 - 0:45:38] ▶
It's just it's a nice feeling to have, I think, to know that there would be some way out there that you could just sort of connect with another species that you could share
[0:45:38 - 0:45:47] ▶