Confederation Park, Burnaby, British Columbia, Summer 1937 or 1938 — three children playing in the bush hear a roaring sound and run to Willingdon Avenue where they observe two round balls of fire approaching from the east on parallel smoke trails at low altitude. Both objects simultaneously execute a 90-degree vertical turn with a rocket-like roar and disappear into a clear sky. Primary witness retained the memory 70 years, comparing the objects to jets before noting that jets did not exist at the time. Source: Brian Vike, HBCC UFO Research, February 22, 2007. Case Status: Insufficient Data. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO | UAP | SIGHTING REPORT
1937 or 1938: Confederation Park, Burnaby, B.C.
On a summer day in 1937 or 1938, three children playing in the bush at Confederation Park in Burnaby, British Columbia heard a roaring sound and ran to Willingdon Avenue to see what it was. Coming from the east, parallel to the ground and at low altitude, were two parallel streaks of smoke — and at the head of each trail, a round ball of fire. The objects were moving fast, closing on the park in formation, smoke trailing behind them in straight lines. Then, simultaneously, both fireballs roared like rockets and turned straight up — a 90-degree vertical departure — and disappeared into a clear blue sky. No clouds to hide in. No airstrip to return to. No aircraft technology available in British Columbia in 1937 or 1938 that could have produced that maneuver. The witness, recounting the incident to HBCC UFO researcher Brian Vike approximately 70 years later, said he would compare them to jets today — but of course, he knew, there were no jets back then. He still remembered it.
Date: Summer 1937 or 1938
Sighting Time: Daytime — exact time not recorded
Day/Night: Day
Location: Confederation Park, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada (adjacent to Willingdon Avenue)
Urban or Rural: Semi-rural — Confederation Park was largely undeveloped bush in the late 1930s on the northern edge of Burnaby
No. of Entity(‘s): None reported
Entity Type: N/A
Entity Description: N/A
Hynek Classification: DD — Daylight Disc (round objects seen in daylight; metallic or fiery appearance; maneuver not consistent with known aircraft)
Duration: Not recorded — brief; objects approached from the east, made 90-degree vertical turn, and disappeared
No. of Object(s): 2
Description of the Object(s): Two round balls of fire traveling parallel to the ground at low altitude from the east, each leaving a straight smoke trail. Both simultaneously executed a 90-degree vertical departure and disappeared into clear sky. Witness compared them to jets — a technology not yet in existence at the time of the sighting.
Shape of Object(s): Round — balls of fire
Size of Object(s): Not recorded
Color of Object(s): Fiery — round balls of fire with smoke trails
Distance to Object(s): Low altitude, close enough to observe clearly from Willingdon Avenue
Height & Speed: Low altitude, parallel to ground on approach; vertical departure at high speed described as roaring like a rocket
Number of Witnesses: 3 (three children; two subsequently deceased by time of report)
Special Features/Characteristics: Two objects in formation; simultaneous parallel smoke trails; simultaneous 90-degree vertical turn at speed described as rocket-like; clear sky departure with no cloud cover; maneuver not possible for any 1937–1938 aircraft technology; witness retained clear memory 70 years later; witness self-corrected using contemporary jet analogy
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Source: Report submitted to Brian Vike, HBCC UFO Research, February 22, 2007 — secondhand account reported by the witness approximately 70 years after the event; two of the three original child witnesses deceased by time of report
Summary/Description: Three children playing in the bush at Confederation Park in Burnaby, BC, in summer 1937 or 1938 heard a roaring sound and ran to Willingdon Avenue where they observed two round balls of fire approaching from the east at low altitude, each leaving a parallel smoke trail. Both objects simultaneously turned 90 degrees vertical with a roaring sound and disappeared into a clear blue sky. The primary witness retained the memory clearly for approximately 70 years, comparing the objects to jets while acknowledging that jets did not exist at the time.
Related Cases: 1937 or 1938 Porlier Pass Vancouver Island (Martin Jasek/UFO*BC — same year, same region, solo witness spherical CE-I) | 1937 Vancouver BC disc photograph (provenance unknown — same year, same city) | 1933 Nipawin Saskatchewan (Musgrave/FSR — same era, Canadian DD with physical trace)
DETAILED REPORT
The Confederation Park, Burnaby case of summer 1937 or 1938 is a three-witness DD event reported to HBCC UFO Research in 2007 — approximately 70 years after the observation — by a man then in his late 70s describing something he saw as a child of 10 or 11. Brian Vike is a credible Canadian regional UFO researcher; HBCC UFO Research is a legitimate organization with a documented intake record for British Columbia cases. The source chain is single-witness oral testimony reported decades after the event, which places it firmly in the Insufficient Data category by source-chain standards, but the case contains several internal elements that give it more analytical weight than its age and source tier might suggest.
The first is formation behavior. Two objects, not one, moving in parallel from the east on identical trajectories at identical altitudes with identical smoke trails. Formation flight in 1937–1938 was exclusively a military aviation behavior, and the Royal Canadian Air Force had no operational aircraft stationed near Burnaby in that period. The RCAF’s pre-war strength was minimal — by 1939 it had fewer than 4,000 personnel and a handful of biplane training aircraft. No military formation flight over a suburban Vancouver park was scheduled, recorded, or reported. The two objects were behaving in coordinated synchrony without being conventional aircraft.
The second is the maneuver. A simultaneous 90-degree vertical turn — both objects turning straight up at the same instant from level low-altitude flight — is not a maneuver available to any propeller-driven aircraft of the era. It is barely available to jet aircraft. The witness described the sound as roaring like a rocket, consistent with the high-energy vertical departure he observed. His immediate comparison, 70 years later, was to jets — the closest frame of reference he had in 2007 for objects that moved fast, left exhaust trails, and could do what he saw. He then self-corrected: there were no jets then. That self-correction is an important credibility marker. He was not trying to fit the observation to a known category; he was reaching for the best available analogy and then honestly acknowledging its limitation.
The third is the clear sky. The objects disappeared into a clear blue sky — not into cloud cover, not beyond the horizon. They went up and were gone. A vertical departure at sufficient speed against a cloudless sky leaves no conventional explanation.
Confederation Park in the late 1930s was largely undeveloped bush on the northern edge of Burnaby, bordered by Willingdon Avenue on the west. The children were playing in the bush and ran to the avenue when they heard the sound — suggesting the approach was audible before it was visible, and that the objects were moving fast enough that the children caught them only as they reached the avenue. The two deceased witnesses cannot corroborate the account, but their presence in the original observation is noted and the witness does not claim the others doubted what they saw.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The Willingdon Avenue Departure — Burnaby 1937/38 and the Pre-War BC Record
- Source Chain and Temporal Decay: The 70-year gap between the event and the HBCC report is the case’s primary limitation. Memory research consistently shows that emotionally salient events — sudden, alarming, anomalous — are retained with greater fidelity than routine experiences, and the core elements here (the roaring sound, the two smoke trails, the simultaneous vertical departure into clear sky) are the kind of high-salience perceptual data that resist degradation. The witness’s jet comparison and self-correction suggest active, honest cognitive processing rather than confabulation. HBCC UFO Research’s intake methodology under Brian Vike was systematic; Vike documented the witness’s framing faithfully including the uncertainty about the exact year.
- The Jet Analogy as Diagnostic Tool: The witness’s unprompted comparison to jets — followed immediately by his own acknowledgment that jets did not exist in 1937–38 — is analytically valuable in two ways. First, it establishes that the objects had the kinetic and acoustic profile of high-speed jet-propelled craft: fast, loud, leaving exhaust trails, capable of abrupt directional change. Second, it demonstrates that the witness was not retrofitting a post-war UAP narrative onto a childhood memory; he was trying to describe something genuinely anomalous using the best technology analogy available to him in 2007 and then calibrating that analogy against historical fact. The jet comparison is not contamination — it is honest phenomenological description.
- Formation Flight and Synchronized Maneuver: The simultaneous 90-degree vertical turn of both objects is the case’s most analytically significant element. Coordinated maneuver of two objects at high speed with no visible communication mechanism, no separation, and no divergence before or during the vertical turn is not consistent with independently piloted conventional aircraft and is not consistent with natural phenomena. Ball lightning does not travel in formation on parallel smoke trails. Meteors do not turn 90 degrees vertically. Whatever the two objects were, they were operating as a coordinated pair.
- The Pre-War British Columbia UAP Context: The 1937–1938 period produced two other documented BC cases in the archive: the Porlier Pass Vancouver Island spherical CE-I (Jasek/UFO*BC) and the 1937 Vancouver disc photograph (provenance unverified). Together with the Confederation Park case, these establish a thin but consistent pre-war BC UAP record across three different observation types — a close-proximity sphere following a fishing boat, two fireballs in formation with simultaneous vertical departure, and a disc photograph — in the same geographic region within approximately 12 months of each other.
Three children in the bush at Confederation Park ran to Willingdon Avenue and saw something that one of them would remember for 70 years without finding a satisfying explanation for it. Two round balls of fire, parallel smoke trails, low altitude, roaring sound, and then straight up — both of them, at the same moment, into a clear sky that had nowhere to hide them. He would have called them jets, except jets didn’t exist yet. Brian Vike took the report in 2007. The two other witnesses were gone. The sky over Burnaby in the summer of 1937 or 1938 had been clear. Case Status: Insufficient Data — not because the witness was unreliable, but because 70 years and two deceased corroborating witnesses are the limits the archive has to work with.
