After a Canadian woman witnesses a UFO landing near her home, a mysterious video tape of the event is sent to investigators.
![A UFO with a large beam of red and blue light hovering in the sky of Ontario Canada](https://cdn.unsolved.com/wp-content/uploads/existing/ufo_canadian_ufo1.jpg?x38205)
A UFO spotted in Ontario, Canada
![A helicopter in the night sky](https://cdn.unsolved.com/wp-content/uploads/existing/ufo_canadian_ufo2.jpg?x38205)
A helicopter mysterious appeared after the sighting
CASE DETAILS
On August 18, 1991, at around 10 PM, Diane Labenek of West Carleton, Ontario, Canada, had just put her children to bed, and her husband was out running an errand, when the dogs began to howl. When Diane investigated, she witnessed a scene that she couldn’t explain:
“I looked out the window and I saw flames out on the field, extremely red flames and lots of smoke. It didn’t look like a fire. I know what a fire looks like when you start a fire out there when the grass is very dry. If you start a fire, you will see it moving either this way, or closer to the woods. And the fire was on one spot only. I saw a ship coming down close to the flames. Right on top of the ship, I saw a blue flashing light and another light was on the bottom, very bright. I didn’t know what to do. I was looking at it for about 10 minutes or so. And then the ship went a little bit back over the trees and it disappeared and I saw all the flames turn out at the same time. I don’t think I’d like to see it again. It’s very scary. I’ve lived here for many, many years and I have never been so scared in my life.
Diane said it entered her mind to call the police, but she worried what they would think:
“What am I going to tell them? I’m going to tell them I saw flares out there past 10 o’clock at night and there was a ship up there. And they were going to say, ‘Okay Diane, that’s fine, we’re coming over.’ So that’s why I didn’t call.”
![A person holding a VHS tape](https://cdn.unsolved.com/wp-content/uploads/existing/ufo_canadian_ufo3.jpg?x38205)
A UFO researcher received evidence
According to Diane, ten minutes after the lights blinked out, a helicopter appeared. It flew low to the ground over the field where Diane had seen the unexplained lights. After criss-crossing the area, it passed over Diane’s house and disappeared into the night. The next morning, Diane explored the empty fields around her house, searching for evidence of the previous night’s events:
“I searched everything. There were no marks. There were no spots. There were no matches, there was just nothing. The only person I told was my mom and my husband. It kind of bothered me inside for a long, long time, not to tell anybody. But when I went out on the field and I could not find anything, who is going to believe me that this really happened? So I kept it to myself.”
In February of 1992, six months after Diane’s encounter, a package from Canada arrived at the office of Bob Oechsler, one of the foremost UFO researchers at the time. The package had no return address. Inside were secret military documents, pictures, a map, and a videotape of the incident at West Carleton. According to Bob Oechsler:
“On the label was the name “Guardian.” And it was accompanied by a fingerprint. Guardian to me was an enigma, certainly nothing I had heard about in the UFO literature. So it was a mystery starting from scratch.”
![A man holding a home video camera at a larg beam of light in the night sky](https://cdn.unsolved.com/wp-content/uploads/existing/ufo_canadian_ufo4.jpg?x38205)
How did “Guardian” know where to film the UFO?
At the time, Oechsler was unaware of Diane’s sighting, but he later discovered that the video accurately showed what she had reported seeing. The tape showed a cluster of brightly burning red flames, similar to flares. To their right hovered a dark, disk-like object emitting a bright glow from its underside. The object was capped by a rapidly strobbing blue light. To Bob Oechsler, the tape looked real:
“I got a sense, initially, that this was a real event occurring in a field as opposed to some prop set up in a room somewhere. I kind of had a sense I might be dealing with something that was potentially authentic here.”
The map that was included in the package directed Oechsler to West Carleton, Ontario. He went there with UFO researcher Graham Lightfoot. When they interviewed Diane, she described exactly what was in the videotape sent by Guardian:
“She had not seen a tape. She had no idea what we knew. And yet she was able to describe things that we already knew from the tape.
Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a U.S. Navy physicist and photo analyst, has studied UFOs for years:
“It’s one of the clearest videos I’ve seen that shows a structured object. There’s the beacon light, blue light evidently, reflecting down on the body of the craft, the outline of the object itself. You can see some sort of dark lines that appear, some brightness structure, indicating something generating light is hanging down below the object. It’s generating green light as well as blue light.”
Dr. Maccabee believes the tape is not a fraud:
“The section of the video which shows the object as sort of appearing over a rise is quite convincing to me as what you would expect if somebody were in the field trying to get closer to it and not knowing how close he could get. And so he turns on his camera while he’s walking. He knows he’s going to come up over a rise and see it and you can see in the video he moves further and further down until you see the whole device. Suddenly, the light coming towards him gets brighter and brighter and you get a great big diffuse reflection or image in the camera, which suggests to me that this object shined a beam, a blue beam right at him.”
![Canadian government documents about the UFO](https://cdn.unsolved.com/wp-content/uploads/existing/ufo_canadian_ufo5.jpg?x38205)
Are these government documents a fraud?
Dr. Maccabee estimates the object to be 20 to 30 feet in diameter. According to Bob Oechsler, that’s too big to be a hoax:
“It appeared to be so large that it would not be logical to try to set all this up at night, under darkness. There would’ve been evidence during the day of movement of generators, of somebody hauling cables, maybe a big apparatus or something that they would’ve had to bring in there for that night. Clearly, if there was a hoax involved, Diane would’ve seen evidence of it in advance.”
Audio analysis of the tape revealed only the distant barking of dogs, probably Diane’s.
The craft itself seemed to be silent. There was no audible trace of power generators which, if the object was staged, would be necessary to run its massive lights.
Dr. Robert Nathan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reviewed the tape in a non-official capacity. He could not explain the images or dismiss the tape as a hoax:
After the incident, low-flying helicopters cruised over West Carleton on a regular basis. The helicopters were black, green, or maroon in color. They were unmarked and had darkly tinted windows. The Canadian military denies any involvement. Where the helicopters came from and what they were searching for remains a mystery. According to Maj. N.J. Patterson of the Canadian Forces:
“The helicopters that are used in this area of Canada do not fly low in that area. There are no requirements for our military helicopters to go and fly near private citizen’s property like that.”
Bob Oechsler says the key to the entire incident lies with the person using the name Guardian:
“I think Guardian has to be connected to the event in some way. I don’t see any way Guardian could’ve just happened on to this. I don’t see Guardian as a UFO investigator. Guardian is much more involved in this than the evidence even suggests, in my opinion.”
But supposed military documents that arrived with the videotape raise serious questions about Guardian’s credibility. The papers allege far-reaching conspiracies involving UFOs, Red China, and nuclear weapons. Bob Oechsler was skeptical:
“There’s some question, immediately, with regard to the authenticity of the documentation, that it didn’t look like it was a typical government document.”
Maj. Patterson reviewed one of the documents:
“This document is clearly a fabrication. There are way too many errors in the document to make it authentic. Someone with very little effort could have come a lot closer than this.”
Included on the videotape are images which Guardian claimed show an alien being. Again, Bob Oechsler wasn’t convinced:
“Clearly, this could’ve have been someone dressed up in a costume. But that posed a major question: if, in fact, the video images of the disk were authentic, why would anyone contaminate such an extraordinary event with fake images of alien creatures?”
Although the video arrived with questionable material, many experts believe that the event shown on the tape did indeed take place. But was it a staged event or an actual craft of some sort? Bob Oechsler says that only one person can answer that question:
“This is either an extraordinary top secret flying vehicle of somebody’s government or it is of a non-human origin. Having no contact with Guardian is probably the biggest frustration to an investigation like this. We don’t know who Guardian is, what Guardian represents. We don’t know if Guardian was sent or went on his own. We have no idea what the solution to many of these mysteries are going to be. We may never know.”
Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.
Glen E Smith
It’s nice to see others reporting UFO sightings. I had mine in about 1958 -1960. My two older brothers and I were fishing on the Ridieu Canal (River) a few miles from Kingston when we noticed four silver or Grey globes(saucers) sitting in the sky with no visible means of locomotion. The first one was probably one kilometer from us with the others quite widely spaced out to the South-West. We had no camera ,of course, so we just watched and fished along. Eventually these craft started to, one by one, slip out of sight. The furthest going first. It was like they were entering another dimension. In a half hour, or so, they had disappeared leaving me with many unanswered questions that I am still seeking answers for. I’m an old man now and I’m afraid that these answers will never come while I am still alive. Best to you all and good luck in your endeavors. Glen E Smith
Pat
I watched this case on another show years later and it was all hoxed they said.
Aubrey
UFOs can be real or can be a new understanding but in fact before ww2 their was a UFO made by the United States of America army so who knows if their is something going on as if their is someone who can and has tried to make these such things.and maybe if some county tries to do something to recreate this such thing.
E.a. micnevitch
All UFO sightings are fake
Check out Corrado Malanga
Since before the last ice age also? There is way to much evidence since prehistoric times, read for exemple the rig vedas in particular the vimanashastra where the “machines of the gods” are described in great detail including weapons and wars fought were still to this day nuclear glass is found without a crater, indicating a explosion of a bomb, one of these places is the historic place of the city of Sodom. One line on said ancient hindu texts says when translating: “the pilot of the machine should turn on the energy shield with the switch on his right before turning on the engine, otherwise he will die of radiation (radiation sikness symptoms are common with close incounters of ufos), for further information go look in the manual of the machines” this is a literal quot fro the vimanashastra, a text thousands of years old, and just on little clue, the is so much more including the true story of the universe hidden in plain sight in “myths” and religions, where also can be found the oringins of humanity on this planet and the reason aliens are here, to steal the souls of humans so that can live forever, that is the “amrita” of “nectar of the gods” and that is what piramids where used for, they are a musical instument that propagated frequencies trough water inside to detach the soul of a man (most don’t have one, 80% of humans are npcs just like aliens) to give it to the faroe, that’s why many rulers in the past lived hundreds/thousands of years.
Abby
Seeing is believing. I saw a ufo when I was 8 yrs old. It was right outside my apartment and my mother called the police. I could see the windows and it would get brighter and then dimmer. It looked like a basic ufo that people always describe seeing. No wings at all. It looked like there was another craft below it but I could be wrong. It was the only ufo I ever saw. It was extraordinary. I don’t think we are alone in the universe but I think our military is responsible for most ufo sightings.
Aln
You don’t know what UFO means
Deborah
I have observed 3 of things closely resembling these UFO’s. I was intrigued by the name “Guardian” or “The Guardians” because of what was happening to me at the time they appeared and what seemed to be their agenda. I was born in 1957 and this happened when I was 16 in the winter of 1973 outside of a small southern town of Iowa. It was late one night while it was snowing. Have often thought of this, and most of my memories are still quite clear. Remarkable. Whether this is a hoax or not makes no difference to me…my encounter was real.
Kyla
Hi Deborah!! I have had a sighting as well in 2016 with 3 different people as we were coming out of work , I saw a huge typical craft it had the what I call Christmas lights going around it and I saw it as completely see through it then quickly turned into an orb and disappeared! My life has been changed ever since I have experienced what would be called paranormal activity not harmful or frightening though. My question to you is did the crafts you saw look like orbs ? I’m wondering if these craft are connected to our consciousness in some way and others are military made ?
Anonymous
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Chad Pharies
I THINK ITS ALIENS RUNNNNNN
Kendra Morgan
It’s a pity it was proven a hoax. Before i found out about it’s lack of authenticity, i was considering the possibility of the obviously fake documents being there on purpose. If the Guardian was real, if it wasn’t a hoax, then perhaps he/she decided to slip the real facts in amongst a bunch of rubbish. Why? So that only the right people would find it. I’d imagine that the Guardian wouldn’t take precautions like delivering it anonymously if they were okay with just anyone seeing it.
Oh well. It would have been interesting if it was real,
Scb
What are you talking about? It was not a hoax and nobody proved anything. This is probably the best ufo footage ever.
Abby
Unfortunately, it was a hoax.
Tommy
Unfortunately, the person claiming it’s a hoax is wrong.
Jennie tidwell
We was in bed and our sons dog had been barking every night and my husband opened our back door to quieten the dog and when he did he hollered 91st me to come there and what we seem was incredible they was in the shape of a triangle five ufos at the bottom row four three two and then one all being triangular in shape w red and white lights they were at the tree line and rose up in the sky all together and I’m a blink of an eye they was gone
8284339256@att.net
The question I wanted to ask was about using fingerprint to identify who sent tape to figure out the truth since fingerprints are unique to each person.
Vet Hobby
Just saw Guardian episode. Nobody seems to know what was seen nor doubt it being solved. My question is about the fingerprint on the tape. Has anyone thought to use it to find out who the tape is from? Nothing was mentioned about that.
Guardian
Gaurdian is the husband of the woman
Jim fairbanks
Why dont they have the finger print on the tape processed to find out whos it is???
Mulder
This one has been proven a hoax
https://sites.google.com/site/paranormalzonex/UFOs/the-guardian-ufo-footage
Aubrey
their is no info on if its fake or set up on what you have pinned i spend 2 hours looking through it all and reading it all. and there for what you said was a hoax or lie.
Fox NorthStar
Why can we not see the video as well?
Ms myrlin
The name Guardian and a finger print on the tape. Check Check finger print and you will find the #Guardian..
Brando
Extremely unlikely. You cannot just run a print and locate who it belongs to unless their prints are already on file and most peoples prints (billions of people) have never been on file.