Fishers spot fireball near Lake Winnipeg

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This article was published 12/01/2019 (2468 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fishers on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg caught a flaming fireball — on camera, that is.

Video submitted to the Free Press shows an unknown object, blazing slowly through the sky above the frozen lake and leaving a smoky trail in its wake.

The 19-second clip was taken sometime Friday afternoon, said Henry Traverse, who lives in Jackhead, Man., on Kinonjeoshtegon First Nation reserve land. Traverse said his son Phil Traverse and granddaughter Kiasha shot the video and sent it to him while they were out fishing on the lake.

“I don’t know if it was a meteor shower, or a meteorite falling, I don’t know,” Traverse said.

Based on his knowledge of the area, he believes the fiery object was somewhere off to the northwest of Lake Winnipeg. The mysterious phenomenon is far from new for the area, Traverse said.

“We’ve seen lights in the night, up further north where (I fished with) my sons,” he said.

“I’ve seen lots of them, we have a lot of stories from older fishermen that have seen strange moving lights, travelling at the speed of lightning, you know? Going into the water, disappearing into the water and coming out again.”

In early 2015, the Canadian Forces responded to rumours that a UFO had flown near Jackhead, saying the bright lights were from an aircraft being used in a training exercise.

Henry Traverse heard about the UFO rumours at the time.

“I don’t know how true that was, but there’s a lot of things that happened there at that time,” he said.

People in the area have “all kinds of sightings… stories that we’ve been holding and knowing,” he added.

“This is not the first time we’ve seen something like this. But in broad daylight, it’s something to capture. Nowadays, kids, they carry these cellphones, eh? But this is true, what they’ve seen there. It’s not a hoax.”

solomon.israel@freepress.mb.ca

@sol_israel