Multimedia Ted investigations in the news

Imagine a giant, meat-eating, alien goat. Call him Ted. 

Now, imagine someone calls you up and tells you they’ve seen "Ted" flying over their wheat field, or that "Ted" has been leaving detached human feet on Canada’s West Coast, or that the giant, meat-eating, alien goat has been stomping through their community and waking up their infant child at night.

What are you supposed to do?

Well, the Canadian government gets a lot of those sorts of calls, and whether or not the government believes what is being said, it has to act. That means time, energy, and taxpayer dollars.

The following is a compilation of the top five "Ted" investigations the Canadian government and other agencies have undertaken. All are bona fide mysteries. Some have been solved, but in at least one case the government has proclaimed tight-lipped ignorance. 

The ongoing case of the mysterious Windsor hum is an example of a “Ted” investigation in progress, with a hint of results, but with the mystery intact.

The Windsor Hum

Project Magnet

Unidentified missiles off of Newfoundland

Detached feet on the West Coast

Missing gravity near Hudson Bay

The (still kind of) mysterious Windsor hum                 

It began this February: a vibration, like a deep car bass, or a large passing truck, origin unknown. At times residents say they can barely feel or hear it, but at others the hum vibrates enough to disturb a glass of water like the heavy footfalls of a distant Tyrannosaurus Rex. Thankfully, the phenomenon has proven to be not quite as lethal.

Since then, more than a thousand reports of the incident have been made to the area’s city councillor, Al Maghnieh, mostly from west and south Windsor. The hum has gotten louder and longer, say residents. And, since a joint ministry investigation has been launched, the list of possible causes has been thinning.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment ruled out industrial causes on the Canadian side of the border between Windsor and Michigan. Both Earthquake Canada and Natural Resources Canada have also eliminated the possibility of any tectonic origin. And it’s not the local salt mines or those pesky wind turbines either. 

However, the government has not come back empty handed.

On Sept. 21, the Ministry of the Environment’s Teri Gilbert confirmed to CapNews the hum’s source.

“The vibrations and noise are coming from one square kilometre in or near Zug Island,” says Gilbert. 

I told you so, said councillor Maghnieh.

"The vibrations and noise are coming from one square kilometre in or near Zug Island."

Two days before officials confirmed their findings, Maghnieh announced on his Windsor Star blog that he and Mayor Michael Bowdler of River Rouge in adjacent Michigan had already pinpointed Zug Island as the source after tracking the hum right across town.

Residents were quick to tweet that they also had long suspected the Zug Island industrial complex in Michigan to be the cause, pointing to the island’s steel mill as a possible perpetrator.                 

But the mystery endures. Though the epicentre of the hum has been confirmed, the actual cause is yet to be determined. Gilbert says that further investigation is up to the ministry’s American counterparts and she is confident they will follow up.

In the meantime, west and south Windsor residents continue to be woken in the night by the strange, vibrating hum.  

Why study UFO technology? Because the Soviets are!

The case of the Windsor hum is a novel, if rare, example of a government honestly in search of answers. But admitting that there is any mystery to begin with has not always turned out so well for the Canadian government.

Case in point, Project Magnet:

Proposed by a senior radio engineer for Transport Canada, who is himself a bit of a mystery, Project Magnet was created in December 1950 to study UFO sightings in Canada and attempt to reverse-engineer UFO technology before the Soviets. Seriously, it happened.

What the government generously called a research station, but was really a hut the size of an outhouse, was erected in 1952 at Shirleys Bay, just 20 kilometres outside of downtown Ottawa. It housed UFO detection equipment, which included a gamma ray counter just in case the mysterious rays that created The Hulk also fueled alien spacecraft.

Declassified information on Project Magnet was released just six years ago and makes for a startling read. One can’t help but sense an undercurrent of the same sort of Cold-War one-upmanship lampooned in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove.

One document, which appears to have been written by Wilbert Smith, the senior radio engineer himself, works to dispel the notion that these UFO sightings could be anything but alien.

“…unless the technology of some terrestrial nation is much more advanced than is generally known, we are forced to the conclusion that the vehicles are probably extra-terrestrial, in spite of our prejudices to the contrary,” Smith wrote.

What’s more, Smith also seemed to believe that these “flying saucers” were coming from Mars. He was plotting the frequency of reported sightings with the proximity of Earth and Mars. Sure enough, when Mars got closer, the number of UFO sightings went up

Unfortunately, the project was shut down in 1954, the victim of bad press. However, 39 years later the Ottawa Citizen reported that two days before the government closed the book on the project, the Shirleys Bay facility detected a “strange disturbance” overhead, and a Morse code transmission too fast to track. Alien spacecraft? We will never know.

Unidentified missiles off Newfoundland’s coast ignored by the Government

Lately, there has been a disturbing shift in Canadian government investigations; where we once funded research into UFO technology, we now ignore what look like three missiles fired off the coast of Newfoundland by no-one-knows-whom. And there are photographs! One thing is for sure: if Project Magnet were still around, such a clear breach of national defence by an unidentified craft would never have been overlooked.

The sighting occurred on Jan. 25, near Harbour Mille, a small coastal town in Newfoundland.

Darlene Stewart was taking photos as the sun went down when what she described as a missile-like object flew overhead. She quickly snapped a picture.

Others say they saw three of these objects fly out of the water and into the sky, each of them minutes apart.

With photographic evidence and other witnesses willing to back her claim, one would think that this is a “Ted” investigation definitely worthy of the government’s time. Think again.

In Stewart’s photo, the object appears to be on fire, emitting a trail of smoke and flame.

However, the Department of National Defence’s report on the sighting is quick to explain that these could not have been missiles. Only cruise or ballistic missiles are fired from below the water’s surface, says the report, and judging from Stewart’s photos, they definitely weren’t either of those.

So, aliens then?

The only official word – issued in a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office – was that the objects weren’t Canadian hardware.

Nor were they French (the French conducted a missile test on the other side of the Atlantic two days later) and they weren’t toy rockets, as some have suggested.

But if we take the government’s silence as an admission that it really doesn’t have a clue, then this incident represents a fantastic breach of national security. At best, the government knows what this is, but just isn’t telling anyone. Cue – little green men.

Foot fetish on the West Coast

Moving to the other side of Canada, quite a different story has been playing out since 2007. Whereas no one could or cared to explain the three “missiles” off the East Coast, the rash of “disarticulated” feet found in the Salish Sea and elsewhere on the West Coast has been thoroughly studied and explained. But as explainable as detached feet in sneakers may be, it’s just damn weird. And West Coasters, nay the world, can’t get enough.

The media frenzy began on Aug. 20, 2007 when a 12-year-old girl found what she thought was an abandoned sneaker on the shores of Jedidiah Island, located between Vancouver Island and the coast. As she untied the shoelaces, a human foot fell out.

Since that first discovery, six other feet have been found on Canada’s West Coast shores and two more just south of the border.

Stephen Fonseca, chief coroner for B.C.’s Identification and Disaster Response Unit, has been trying to identify the post-mortem owners of these forsaken feet since the investigation began.                 

“Three individuals have been positively identified as being the donors of the four feet identified to date,” said Fonseca. Just to recap: seven feet total, four feet identified. Two feet belong to the same person. None of them voluntarily given. Good?

While Fonseca says he is impressed by the media-mania that has spanned the globe, he says that the presence of these feet is not all that odd. Then again, the guy deals with detached limbs and craniums on a near daily basis.

The explanation is a combination of synthetic polymers and clumsy marine life, he says.

"Three individuals have been positively identified to being the donors of the four feet identified to date."

When a body, especially near water, begins to decompose, individual limbs tend to detach. A foot in a running shoe is even more likely to detach and be found because a passing carnivorous sea beaver may manage to chomp through a shin, but they can’t get to the tasty foot in that sneaker.

So what is left of the foot just floats to the surface for a public on high-alert for bodiless sneakers to find.

Most importantly, says Fonseca, no evidence of foul play has been found in relation to these feet. But, for some reason, Canadians and the world just can’t get enough. Blame it on CSI.                 

You’re less fat at Hudson Bay

While hacking off your own limbs is a viable, if foolhardy, way of achieving weight loss, a more painless alternative would be heading north – specifically to the Hudson Bay area where there is less gravity than in the rest of the world.

Scientists have known about this since the 1960s when the Earth’s gravity was being mapped for the first time. Why Jenny Craig hasn’t been buying huge swaths of Hudson Bay territory is a mystery unto itself.

This NASA graph shows the Hudson Bay area rebounding after the crush of the Laurentide Ice Sheet by a height of 1.1 cm a year.

But the reason for this anomaly has only recently been uncovered. Basically, mass is proportional to gravity, so wherever the Earth is thinner, there is less gravity and vice versa.

At Hudson Bay, this is due to two things: first, millennia ago a massive ice formation called the Laurentide Ice Sheet crushed the earth near Hudson Bay. The sheet has since melted away and the earth has been slowly rebounding but still hasn’t risen back to its full height. Second, convection below the Earth’s crust undulates as it heats and cools and changes the Earth’s mass in different areas. 

The result? At Hudson Bay an extra cheesy poutine is infinitesimally less fattening than elsewhere in Canada. 

From 2002 to 2006, NASA and the German Aerospace Center have compiled information about the Earth’s gravitational anomalies using their GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites. Stationed 500 kilometres above the Earth, the satellites measure the space between each other within a micron. When one satellite’s orbit expands or contracts, the change in distance is measured, thereby confirming a lack or excess of gravity.

While this information is useful for a myriad of legitimate endeavours, it just so happens to prove why Canadians weigh less than our southern brethren.

Source files and Ted investigations in the news

Ted investigations in the news: