UFO ROUNDUP Volume 7 Number 14
Volume 7
Number 14
April 2, 2002
Editor: Joseph Trainor
E-mail: Masinaigan@aol.com
LARGE SAUCER FLIES OVER DOWNTOWN OTTAWA
Canada's UFO flap continued last week with the sighting of a large saucer over Ottawa, the national capital.
On Tuesday, March 19, 2002, at 2 p.m., the huge object appeared over the city, heading north. The woman witness reported, "Right now, I'm still quite excited as today I saw a large flying saucer right over downtown Ottawa (population 323,340) at approximately 2 p.m."
"I was visiting a friend in hospital in Hull (now Gatineau, Quebec--J.T.) for the afternoon today. He went back to his room to get changed because we were going to go outside for a while. So I stayed in the smoking room with a man I had talked to a few times before. This smoking room has a panoramic window view of downtown Ottawa and the hospital is located close to the Ottawa River."
"Anyway, I was sitting there, watching TV, when all of a sudden the man said something to the effect of 'What the hell is that flying over there!?'"
"I looked, expecting a kite or something, but it was this massive saucer. It seemed like at first it was hiding in the lower clouds" but then it revealed itself. "Right there, over downtown Ottawa, was the large craft! Its colour was dark gray metallic. Its shape was round. It was just, you know, the sort of thing I had always read about in UFO sightings. You could call it a classic flying saucer. The sighting lasted for about 30 seconds, then it disappeared out of view due to part of the hospital blocking the way. Its size was a little bigger than an airliner."
"It was heading either north or northwest when last I saw it," she added, "It couldn't have been more than 400 feet (130 meters) above the skyscrapers of downtown Ottawa." (Many thanks to Sue Darroch of Para-Researchers of Canada for forwarding this report.)
MORE UFO REPORTS SURFACE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
Two more UFO reports have surfaced in northern British Columbia as the result of last Saturday's feature story in the Smithers, B.C. Interior.
One sighting took place in Smithers (population 5,624), a town on Provincial Highway 16 about 256 kilometers (160 miles) west of Prince George, B.C. According to ufologist Brian Vike, "The witness said that he had gone to rent a video from the Smithers Hollywood Video store" on Friday, February 1, 2002 at 10 p.m. "and, after he came out and got into his car and started driving down the road, something caught his eye."
"He pulled his vehicle over, got out and watched it (the UFO) fly slowly over and around the town for approximately five minutes. He thought it was descending, and his first thoughts were of a para-glider, and said it was the best way to describe what he was looking at. He also said the object had 'one' bright white light on it. He noticed that the light would go from bright to dim but said he wasn't sure if this was due to the object turning. He also said that its height from the ground would have been 1,500 feet (450 meters)."
On Thursday, February 14, 2002, at midnight, a man living on the south shore of Francois Lake approximately 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the ferry landing, had a close encounter. The witness "saw something very strange in the night sky. He said the night was perfectly dark with the stars shining brightly."
"When he looked up into the sky, something caught his eye due to the speed of the object" which "had lights on it. He went on to explain that he has seen a lot of satellites, planes, etc. but the object was like nothing he could compare it to. He said it almost looked like an aircraft and 'as it came close to my area', the object came to a complete stop and went totally dark. Then, all of a sudden, there was a flash of light which reminded him of" taking a mirror and tilting it to one side to catch the sun's reflection. "And, aiming it (the bright flash) toward the ground, you could see a very bright area lit up. Because it was totally dark, he said it was like a ray of light which seemed to be sweeping the ground."
The witness told Vike that "the sighting only lasted a couple of minutes before (the UFO was) continuing on its way at an incredible speed. It came from the north and left heading directly south, then disappeared."
"He went on to say he couldn't believe how powerful the light was," Vike said, "It was almost as if the sun were shining through clouds, giving the effect of a beam of sunlight. It looked as if the UFO was looking for something as the beam of light swept the ground."
Francois Lake is in the Grassy Plains area, just south of Burns Lake, B.C. (population 1,793). Burns Lake is at the intersection of Provincial Highways 16 and 35 about 216 kilometers (135 miles) west of Prince George, B.C. (See the Smithers, B.C. Interior for March 23, 2002. Many thanks to Brian Vike for these reports.)
NEW MIRACLE REPORTED AT MEDJUGORJE IN BOSNIA
On Wednesday, February 27, 2002, an Italian UFO contactee, visionary and stigmatic named Giorgio Bongiovanni appeared on the TV show La Vita in Diretta in Rome "without his habitual (stigmatic) scar on his forehead, which he had been exhibiting for about nine years."
Bongiovanni claimed to have the stigmata (a phenomenon in which people spontaneously develop the wounds of Jesus Christ--J.T.), in particular a cross on the forehead similar to that of St. Gemma Galgagni (1878-1903). Shortly after his TV appearance, Bongiovanni "issued a press release through his magazine Nonsiamosoli (Italian for We Are Not Alone--J.T.) that he made a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina," where he received a miraculous cure..
According to Bongiovanni, he visited the shrine atop Mount Podbrdo on the morning of Monday, February 11, 2002 "and prayed silently to ask the Virgin Mary to render invisible at least the scar of his stigmata."
To his astonishment, the former Miriam bat-Joachim suddenly appeared before him and touched his forehead with her fingertips. The scar instantly vanished. Then she asked him to return to Italy and make known what had happened.
This is the latest in a series of miraculous happenings involving Miriam and Medjugorje (Croatian for Between the Mountains--J.T.)
Medjugorje is located 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Mostar and about 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital.
The first strange incident took place in 1932 involving Pope Pius XI. This pope was born Achille Ratti near Milano and, after his ordination as a priest, was an archivist at the Vatican Library. After World War I, he became the papal nuncio in Warsaw, Poland. He was also an enthusiastic mountain climber.
(Editor's Note: Curiously enough, the then-Archbishop Ratti was in Warsaw in May 1920 when Pope John Paul II--birth name Karol Wojytla--was born.)
One night in February 1932, Pope Pius XI was asleep in his Vatican bedroom and dreamed that he was climbing a mountain. A mountain he had never seen before. He knew he wasn't in Italy--he had scaled nearly every peak in the Alps.
When he reached the summit, he found Miriam waiting patiently for him there. She was wearing a light gray dress with a long white veil.
"Achille," she told him, "I want you to build a cross on this site. Because this place will become very important in the future."
Looking around in bewilderment, he mumbled, "Where am I?"
"Yugoslavia." And smiling gently, she added, "Remember this mountain, Achille."
And the pope suddenly woke up. That was a weird dream, he thought.
A few months later, Pope Pius XI received a petition from the Archbishop of Mostar in Yugoslavia (now Bosnia-Herzegovina--J.T.) The diocese wanted to erect a concrete cross on Mount Sipovac commemorating the 1,900th anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. When the pope saw a photograph of the proposed site, he gasped out loud. It was the mountaintop he had seen in his dream.
He signed the construction order immediately. The cross was erected in 1933, and the mountain's name was changed from Sipovac to Krisevac (Croatian for Mountain of the Cross--J.T.)
Flash-forward nearly a half-century to June 24, 1981. Two teenaged girls--Ivanka Ivankovic, 15, and Mirjana Dragicevic, 16--were hiking up Mount Podbrdo. Both girls were staying with relatives in Bijakovici, a village located between Mount Krisevac and Mount Podbrdo, and had decided to hike up the latter to smoke some cigarettes and enjoy the view.
As they reached the summit, Ivanka and Mirjana saw strange lights flashing in the sky above the cross on Mount Krisevac. Then a brilliant light appeared on Mount Podbrdo, about 40 meters (132 feet) away, and they saw "a beautiful lady in a gray dress with a long white veil" appear at the heart of the glow.
"Let's get out of here!" Ivanka yelled, and they ran down the hillside trail in a panic.
Halfway down the mountain, they encountered some friends from the village and told their story. "A group of them returned to the mountain. There she was! They wondered if she could really be the Blessed Virgin Mary. They all ran away in terror."
Yet Mirjana Dragicevic was intrigued by the incident. She returned to the spot the following day, June 25, 1981, with some friends, Vicka Ivankovic, 17; Ivan Dragivecic, 16; Marija Pavlovic, 17; Jakov Colo, 10--and a reluctant Ivanka, and the Marian apparitions began in earnest. They have been going on now for over twenty years. (See UFO-Italia for March 9, 2002. Also The Visions of the Children: The Apparitions of the Blessed Mother at Medjugorje by Janice T. Connell, St. Martin's Press, New York, N.Y., 1993, pags 4 through 7; and The Queen of Peace Visits Medjugorje by Joseph A. Pelletier, A.A., Assumption Publications, Worcester, Mass., 1987, pages 13 through 21. Grazie a Edoardo Russo di Centro Italiano di Studi Ufologici per questo rapporto.)
(Editor's Comment: Bongiovanni's encounter took place on February 11. Oddly enough, this is a significant date in Marian lore. On February 11, 1858, Bernadette Soubirous had her first encounter with Miriam at the Grotte de Massabielle near Lourdes in southern France.)
UFOLOGISTS WANT TO SEND A PETITION TO THE UN
Tired of being ignored and brushed off by different national governments around the world, a group of ufologists are planning to bring the movement to the forefront of international politics--by submitting a petition to the United Nations.
"An international, multilingual petition requesting a UN investigation and disclosure of UFO information" has been written, and it will be presented to Secretary-General Kofi Annan in March 2003.
The goal of the petition, spokesman John Velez said, "is to increase the number of nations--Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France and Spain--who have either declassified or released their UFO files, or cooperated with civilians and openly reported UFO encounters to the media."
"A compilation of world-wide UFO-footage will be submitted with the petition," Velez added, "Please read and digitally sign the petition, then spread the word."
The International Petition for UFO Information Disclosure can be viewed at the following website...http://www.virtuallystrange.net/petition. (Many thanks to John Velez for this news release.)
