By Hattie Dyck
From: Art Burton, Lattie’s Brook. March 2021
Reports of seeing UFO’s always bring out the believers and the non-believers in what constitutes these unidentified foreign objects. An experience that Art Burton, Lattie’s Brook had in the mid to late 60’s was no different.
Art was a single, young man at the time living in Rockingham. One clear, moonlit night, while returning from dropping his girlfriend at the time, later to become his wife, off at her house he spotted a long sausage-shaped something in the sky. It hung over the city of Dartmouth just above the skyline. It glowed yellow and seemed to hover. He quickly hurried the rest of the way home and phoned Flame to tell her to look out her window.
The call was unnecessary, she was already watching the object with her unobstructed view atop Tremont Drive. When Art went outside again, the object was gone.
Thousands of others had witnessed the sighting. Only one topic prevailed on CHNS’s morning talk show, Open Mike with Mike MacNeil: the UFO over the twin cities. Father Burke-Gaffney, resident astronomer and a Jesuit priest at St. Mary’s University was
called on for an explanation.
The priest claimed to have an open mind about these phenomena, but in all the cases he examined, 99.9 percent had a logical, earthly explanation. In this case, his logic was that a temperature inversion caused a train passing through Dartmouth to appear to be up in the sky. Strangely this had never happened before or has never happened since.
The 1966-67 period of history is considered the “Mother of All UFO Waves.” Official justifications include: hoaxes, meteorites, marsh case, and yes, temperature inversions.
Art says take your pick of explanations, but he remembers wearing a jacket that night.
It must have been a lot hotter on the Dartmouth side of the Basin.
Art Burton now lives at Lattie’s Brook.
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