The October 3, 1843 Warwick, Ontario encounter — farmer Charles Cooper watched three white, motionless, moaning figures pass overhead beneath a strange cloud, corroborated in part by several nearby witnesses.
THINK ABOUTIT ENTITY ENCOUNTER REPORT
1843: Warwick, Ontario — Charles Cooper’s Three White Figures
Charles Cooper was working a field near Warwick, Canada West — present-day Ontario — on October 3, 1843, under a light rain, when the sky cleared and a rumbling began somewhere to the west. It grew louder. He looked up and saw a cloud approaching, and beneath it, three human figures, entirely white, sailing through the air with no wing-beats of their own, barely higher than the treetops. They passed directly above him, motionless, moaning. Cooper called out to men working a neighboring field; they saw the cloud, but not what was beneath it. A boy elsewhere reportedly saw the same three figures “side by side.” A person six miles off saw the cloud and the figures both, and heard the sound. Others in between saw only the cloud, and heard only the moaning.
The case survives because a spiritualist named Addison A. Sawin investigated it and had it printed in an 1850 pamphlet, Wonderful Phenomena, by Eli Curtis — who concluded the three figures were angels, and male ones at that. Charles Fort dug the pamphlet up decades later for New Lands and recorded it without the theology, but with one detail Curtis’s pamphlet includes almost as an aside: the figures appeared to have belts around their bodies, as though they had been lowered from something above. Fort noted the observation and moved on. It has been sitting in the record, unexplained either way, ever since.
Date: October 3, 1843
Sighting Time: Daytime
Day/Night: Day
Location: Warwick, Canada West (present-day Warwick Township, Lambton County, Ontario), Canada
Urban or Rural: Rural
No. of Entity(‘s): Three
Entity Type: Humanoid — three entirely white male figures, described in the original pamphlet as angels
Entity Description: Three human forms, “perfectly white,” sailing through the air without wing motion of their own, appearing to have belts around their bodies as if lowered from something above; motionless in posture while airborne; emitting a moaning, mournful sound
Duration: Not precisely recorded — the rumbling was heard approaching before the sighting, and the figures were watched from approach to passing overhead to drifting out of sight
No. of Object(s): One — an accompanying cloud, from beneath which the figures sailed
Description of the Object(s): A “very remarkable” cloud, described by multiple witnesses independent of whether they saw the figures beneath it
Shape of Object(s): Not specified beyond “cloud”
Size of Object(s): Not recorded
Color of Object(s): Not specified for the cloud; the three figures beneath it were described as entirely white
Distance to Object(s): The figures passed directly above the primary witness at approximately treetop height
Height & Speed: Approached from the west accompanied by a growing rumbling sound, passed overhead just above treetop level, and continued on until drifting out of sight
Number of Witnesses: One primary named witness (Charles Cooper), plus multiple partial secondary witnesses: men laboring in a neighboring field (saw the cloud only), a boy (reportedly saw the three figures directly), a person living approximately six miles away (saw the cloud and figures, heard the sound), and unspecified others who saw only the cloud and heard only the sound
Special Features/Characteristics: Figures apparently moved without self-generated flight motion; described as wearing belts around their bodies, suggestive to some later readers of a lowering apparatus rather than natural or angelic flight; sound described consistently across multiple witnesses as a moaning or mournful noise, likened by some accounts to repeated cries of “Woe”
Case Status: Unexplained.
Source: Eli Curtis, Wonderful Phenomena (New York, 1850), investigated by Addison A. Sawin; Charles Fort, New Lands (1923), Part Two, Chapter Six; John Robert Colombo, UFOs over Canada: Personal Accounts of Sightings and Close Encounters (Hounslow Press, 1991)
Summary/Description: On October 3, 1843, near Warwick, Canada West (Ontario), Charles Cooper was working in a field when a light rain cleared and he heard a rumbling sound approaching from the west. Looking up, he saw a cloud, and beneath it three entirely white human figures sailing through the air without visible flight motion, appearing to wear belts around their bodies, passing directly above him at roughly treetop height while emitting a moaning sound. Cooper called out to men in a neighboring field, who saw the cloud but not the figures. A boy elsewhere reportedly saw the three beings “side by side”; a person living six miles away reported seeing both the cloud and the figures and hearing the sound; others in the area reported only the cloud and the sound. The case was investigated by spiritualist Addison A. Sawin and published in Eli Curtis’s 1850 pamphlet Wonderful Phenomena, which interpreted the figures as angels. Charles Fort later documented the case in New Lands without the religious framing.
Related Cases: 1835–1844: UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
Detailed Report
The primary source for this case is a pamphlet titled Wonderful Phenomena, published in New York in 1850 by Eli Curtis, reporting an investigation conducted by a spiritualist named Addison A. Sawin. Sawin’s account concerns an event that had taken place seven years earlier, on October 3, 1843, in the township of Warwick, in what was then called Canada West (now Ontario, in Lambton County).
According to the account, a man named Charles Cooper was laboring in a field under a light rain. As the rain cleared, Cooper heard a rumbling sound approaching from the west. Looking up, he saw a cloud drawing near, and beneath it, three human forms, entirely white, sailing through the air without any apparent wing motion or self-propelled flight, moving little higher than the treetops. The figures appeared to have belts around their bodies. Cooper watched them pass directly overhead; they remained motionless in posture throughout, and emitted a sound the pamphlet describes as moaning, elsewhere characterized as a loud and mournful noise.
Cooper called out to men working in a neighboring field. They looked up and saw the cloud, but reported that they could not make out the figures beneath it. Sawin’s investigation turned up several additional partial witnesses: a boy who reportedly saw the three beings “side by side,” making the same mournful sound; a person living some six miles from Cooper’s field who reported seeing both the cloud and the figures, and hearing the sound; and others in the surrounding area who reported seeing “a very remarkable cloud” and hearing the sound, without seeing any figures at all.
Sawin’s own conclusion, delivered in explicitly religious terms (“Yours, in the glorious hope of the resurrection of the soul”), was that the three figures were angels — specifically identified as male. Charles Fort, encountering the pamphlet decades later while researching New Lands, recorded the case without endorsing Sawin’s interpretation, noting dryly that the belted appearance of the figures — “as if they had been let down from a vessel above” — was a detail the pamphlet itself did not attempt to explain or connect to any theory of its own.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
Cooper’s Three Figures — Ontario 1843 and a Correction to the Record
- Classification Issues: This case previously appeared on ThinkAboutIt Docs split across two separate entries — one attributed to “Warwick, England” with Charles Cooper as witness, and a second, unnamed “field laborer” account attributed to “near Warwick, Ontario, Canada” — framed together as a striking cross-Atlantic, same-date coincidence. Checking the case back to its earliest traceable source (Fort’s New Lands, citing Curtis’s 1850 pamphlet) shows this was always a single Ontario sighting, with Cooper as the field witness in both halves of the split account. There was never an independent English report. The cross-continental framing has been retired; this page presents the corrected, single-location account.
- Source Chain Assessment: The chain runs from an 1850 investigative pamphlet (Sawin’s fieldwork, published by Curtis) forward through Fort’s early-20th-century compilation to modern secondary treatments like Colombo’s UFOs over Canada. That is a seven-year gap between the event and its first print documentation — long enough for memory drift, but short enough that Sawin was plausibly speaking to people who remembered the event directly rather than to third- or fourth-hand retellings.
- Pattern Context: The “belts around their bodies… as if let down from a vessel above” detail is the case’s most analytically loaded feature, and it is easy to read too much into it: Curtis and Sawin themselves never developed the idea, and Fort recorded it as an observation rather than a conclusion. Even so, the image of humanoid figures apparently suspended or lowered by some means, moving without self-generated flight, recurs independently across other 19th-century entity accounts in this archive, and is worth tracking as a comparative detail rather than dismissing as incidental.
- Geographic and Historical Context: Warwick Township was newly settled in the 1830s at the time of this sighting — a rural frontier community bisected by the Egremont Road linking London, Ontario to Lake Huron, populated in part by British Army veterans and assisted settlers. A sparsely populated agricultural township of this kind, with fields worked at some distance from one another, is consistent with the pattern of partial, distance-graded witness accounts Sawin recorded — some seeing everything, some seeing only the cloud, one witness six miles off catching both.
A farmer in a newly settled Ontario township looked up from his field on an October afternoon and watched three white, silent, motionless figures pass overhead beneath a strange cloud, moaning as they went. A spiritualist investigator wrote it down as angels; Charles Fort wrote it down as something else worth noting and moved on. Neither explanation has aged particularly well, and neither has been replaced. What remains is Charles Cooper’s own account, corroborated in pieces by his neighbors at varying distances, of something that came out of the west, passed low over his field, and kept going.
“He saw a cloud approaching, and underneath it three men, all completely white in color, sailing through the air little higher than the treetops… they seemed to have belts around their bodies, as if they had been let down from a vessel above.”
