The Yukon Mothership: Fox Lake, 1996

The Klondike Highway runs north from Whitehorse, past Fox Lake, Braeburn Lodge, Carmacks and Pelly Crossing. On the evening of Wednesday, 11 December 1996, motorists along a 216 km stretch of it saw something they could not explain. Two called CHON-FM radio the next day. Most stayed silent until years later, and many spoke only once they were promised anonymity.

Fox Lake. About 8:23 pm. Two cousins were driving from Whitehorse to Carmacks in separate vehicles. FOX2, as the case files call him, saw "a huge object with a row of lights hovering out over the lake." It drifted slowly toward him.

After a few minutes he was almost directly underneath. "The UFO had a solid smooth surface," with "a large white light in the center of this elliptically shaped object." He heard static on his two-way radio. He was "totally in awe and for some reason unafraid."

His cousin, FOX3, saw "a high domed top outlined with small diffused white lights," two rows of large rectangular lights across the middle, and orange lights stacked three high on each side. He started to flash his headlights at it. Then he stopped. He went for his camera instead. Before he could use it, "the UFO got really really bright, and instantly accelerated away to the southeast at a fantastic speed!"

South of Pelly Crossing, two more witnesses saw "a whole big cluster of stars moving!" Large white lights. A grid of smaller blue and green lights. Some red. "There was no noise."

Then the lights went out one after another. "Blink, blink, blink, blink." Near Carmacks, four men pulled over by the village dump to watch lights in the northwest.

In 1998 an anonymous caller linked a Carmacks sighting to Fox Lake. On 28 January 1999, FOX2 read a newspaper article and contacted investigators. Martin Jasek, a civil and water-resources engineer, spent 1999 tracing witnesses. Lorraine Bretlyn helped, and so did Braeburn Lodge owner Steve Watson, who had taken motorists' reports that night.

Jasek named 22 witnesses, and 14 made drawings. His 2000 printed report raised the count to 31, and the MUFON UFO Journal carried the case that February. Triangulating between sites, he put the object at about 1.7 km across. There are no photographs, no video and no radar. Whitehorse air traffic control reported no activity over Fox Lake that night.

Witnesses recalled a scientist on CBC radio calling it a meteor shower. In April 2012, Ted Molczan proposed a rocket. The second stage of the rocket that launched Cosmos 2335 from Baikonur that same day was predicted to re-enter at 8:26 pm local time, give or take 10 to 20 minutes, on a west to east track north of every site. Robert Sheaffer called the case "BUSTED!" and argued in the Skeptical Inquirer that the rows of lights were a debris train about 233 km away. Jasek answered that the cousins, just 0.57 km apart, saw it at the same time, and the parallax between them does not fit an object at re-entry altitude. FOX1's 30 minute sighting also sits awkwardly with a re-entry lasting a minute or two.

Michael Swords called it "possibly one of the best cases ever." Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings ranked it eighth. Discovery Canada's Close Encounters featured it as the first story in its first episode in 2014, and in 2022 the Royal Canadian Mint issued a glow-in-the-dark silver coin, "The Yukon Encounter." In 2000, Pelly Crossing witness Don Trudeau put the question that remains. "Something this big, could move, move along as slowly, as quietly, and defy gravity as I know it?"