Charlie Redstar: the red light over Carman, Manitoba

Spring 1975. Carman is a small town in the RM of Dufferin, in south-central Manitoba. That year Canada lived through what researcher Chris Rutkowski would call its "Summer of UFOs". Manitoba alone logged 134 cases.

Some came early. In February a farmer near Lundar saw a bright red light and felt searing heat, "as if hot plastic was poured over his face". On March 27 a young girl in Graysville woke to a loud shrill sound. The house shook. A red ball of light filled her room.

April 10, 1975. Bob and Elaine Diemert were walking from their farmhouse to their private airfield just outside Carman. They saw "a big red light coming at them. It had a dome on top and was pulsing."

From May 7, it came back night after night. People gathered at the couple's field "to spot 'Charlie Redstar' as it skimmed over trees on the horizon before soaring overhead." Witnesses called it a red fireball that could hang still or shoot away rapidly. Some called it mischievous or playful.

RCMP Constable Ian Nicholson drove out to the Diemert farm. He saw "an oval red light, surrounded with an X-shaped white halo." He followed it for about 12 miles, trying to draw level with it, and stopped about 16 miles west of Carman. Airline pilot Roger Pitts watched it move at a 45-degree angle. Then "a puff of smoke appeared". It was "an odd shape, like a small cloud". And the light was gone.

In May a CKY-TV crew from Winnipeg came out. They called it "a blood-red moon in the night" moving through the trees. On May 13 they reportedly filmed a red orb rising from the treeline and shooting skyward within seconds. That footage has not been found online. On July 1 three friends described an orb near a grain elevator, "about 85 feet in diameter and perfectly round".

The RCMP took reports and passed them to the National Research Council, Canada's clearing house for sightings. One came from Mrs. Freddie Giesbrecht on July 7 about a UFO east of her farmhouse. No formal conclusion about Charlie Redstar has turned up. Grant Cameron watched the light several times from May 1975, then interviewed hundreds of witnesses and began a career as a UFO researcher. In 2017 he published Charlie Red Star.

Some skeptics blamed Jupiter. The NRC gave that answer for an oval craft over Manitoulin Island, Ontario, that August. Weather balloons came up too. In 2025, Kenton Dyck of Winkler's Astro Club dismissed the idea. "You don't see that kind of mobility in weather balloons."

Cameron has his own theory. He points to the Safeguard anti-ballistic-missile complex at Nekoma, North Dakota. "When the nukes were taken out in late 1975, the UFOs went away." The complex reached initial operating capability on April 1, 1975, days before the Diemert sighting. But it was inactivated in 1976, and sightings reportedly ran into that year.

Hundreds of people watched. Some residents claimed more than eighty sightings each. Crowds jammed the gravel roads, and local ads reportedly urged readers to "shop where Charlie Red Star shops". In 2025 Carman marked fifty years with "Table for 300: A Charlie Redstar Dinner" across Ryall Park and the Boyne River bridge. The light itself has never been identified.