Published: 10:16 AM 1/29/2010

Harbour Mille residents spot missile-like projectile flying through sky

By Ken Meaney, Canwest News ServiceJanuary 28, 2010Comments (22)

OTTAWA — A mystery object shaped like an "oversized bullet" that flew over their tiny community this week has people in Harbour Mille, N.L., wondering if they saw a missile launch.

"First thing I thought was: 'My God, it had to be a missile of some sort,' because it looked like an oversized bullet," said Emmy Pardy, who watched it through binoculars for five to eight minutes as it passed silently overhead at sunset Monday.

"It was grey-silver ... It seemed like it had a bit of flame coming through the bottom of it and it had a trail of smoke, or what appeared to be smoke," Pardy said.

"We knew it wasn't a plane and it definitely wasn't any kind of UFO thing," she said, laughing.

A grainy photo shot by another witness, Darlene Stewart, shows an object, trailing what appears to be orange flame, moving at a 45-degree angle to the left against a greyish coloured sky.

Stewart said she actually saw three objects -- one that appeared to go straight up, another that was headed to the right and a third, the one that captured her attention, closer and heading to the left.

"It went up on an angle and it stayed on that angle and we watched it for about 10 minutes," she said, until it disappeared. "To us it looked like a missile."

Pardy said she's certain it came out of the ocean off her community of 140 in Hermitage Bay, an arm of water that stretches up the western side of the Burin Peninsula, the boot shape projecting from the south coast of Newfoundland.

"It was obviously shot from somewhere," she added.

"Now, I'm just wondering if there's something behind this and people just want to keep it hush-hush. ... Probably we'll never know."

An RCMP spokesman said officers took statements and the information was passed on to the federal Department of Public Safety. He referred questions to the department.

A department spokesman, however, said while the government is aware of the media reports of sightings of unidentified objects off Newfoundland it is the RCMP that is investigating.

Chris Rutkowski, a Manitoba science writer and author on the subject of UFOs, doubts the object was extraterrestrial.

"The only possibilities would be either a high-altitude plane with contrails, or possibly missiles," he said.

Stewart called the sighting "scary."

"I want to know what it was," Stewart said. "We all want to know now. Where did it come from and where was it going?"

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