Jan White is coming clean.
He helped to make the big balloon that was mistaken for a UFO by a nurse in the psychiatric ward at the Duncan Hospital in the early morning hours of New Year’s 1970 — and has made headlines again because the encounter is the subject of a coin on unexplained phenomena struck by the Canadian Mint this month.
“I don’t think they’re going to arrest me now,” said White, 79, a long-time barber and carpenter and a resident of Esquimalt. He was in his 20s at the time and attending a party hosted by Les Palmer, who lived on Baker Road near the Duncan Hospital.
“We were just a bunch of people having fun and had no idea what this was going to create,” White said. “Nobody knew someone from the hospital had seen it that night, When the stories came out in the paper a few days later, we all thought we’d better keep quiet.
“But we knew there were no Martians … it was us.”
White said he knew Palmer was making smaller balloons out of dry-cleaning bags, and using candles to lift the floating contraptions into the air and set them off at different times for friends — as was described this week by a Palmer friend, Dan Hughes.
But the balloon they released at the New Year’s Party was much more refined — and much bigger, and it coincides with the nurse’s story and other witness accounts, who described the UFO as 15 metres in diameter and illuminated from the bottom.
White and friend George Halkyard from Mill Bay used plastic salvaged from lumberyards that was used to separate sheets of exotic woods. White would iron them together in overlapping fashion to create a balloon shape and Halkyard created a frame for the bottom of the balloon using aluminum rods that were shaped to hold a pie plate.
They would put gelled denatured alcohol called Sterno into the pie plate and light it. The heat would fill the balloon and give it an unworldly glow as it inflated the balloon and eventually lifted off. He said a hole was cut in the top so some of the hot air could escape.
White and Halkyard, who died decades ago from cancer, had made eight of the balloons and set a few off from Mount Tolmie before taking one up to Duncan for Palmer’s New Year’s party.
Halkyard, White and a few others lit the Sterno fuel in the pie plate in the hospital parking lot because there was a wind that night, and they used the hospital as a shield from the wind.
“It took two of us to hold up the plastic while the [fuel] was lit,” said White. “It just sort of quivered and it cast shadows all around the balloon. It was a pretty spectacular thing because the Sterno really gave it an incandescent glow,” so he could see why someone from a distance would consider it a very odd sight with shadowy effects.
The nurse who witnessed the UFO went into greater detail, saying she noticed figures in the flying object, one of them slowly turning to face in her direction. Another reached down to grab a lever, and the tilted craft began to spin in a counter-clockwise direction before silently and swiftly moving higher and away.
RCMP officers who investigated were puzzled and could not explain the incident, according to reports.
White said the Sterno fuel would sometimes leak from the pie plate, sending out what looked like dripping sparks.
“We just felt we better keep quiet about the whole thing because we didn’t want to get into any trouble,” said White.
He was worried about fires from the dripping fuel, but said they only launched the balloons in wet winter weather when the risk was low.
A few weeks later, a newspaper article said a woman had reported a UFO “dripping sparks” in the Mill Bay area.
White said Les and Renee Palmer threw legendary parties and jam sessions, noting Les Palmer and many of his friends were great guitar players, and Palmer was involved in bands and session recordings in Nashville at one point.
He said he told only a few people of the prank over the years. The story was picked up by UFO enthusiasts and was written about in books and “the myth just kept going.”
But times have changed, said White.
“I used to care about what people thought, but I don’t anymore. I’m old enough now.
“More than half a century later and with this coin from the Canadian Mint coming out, it was time for the truth to come out.”
The mint is selling the coin — the sixth in a series of unexplained phenomena — for $139. It comes with black-light technology that makes it glow in the dark and has a limited run of 6,500.
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