Canada reported unidentified aerial event — 1971-10-11 — Trinity Bay, NFLD

Elizabeth Swann reported unusual lights while driving from Hodge's Cove toward Clarenville beside Trinity Bay at about 19:30 on 11 October 1971. The RCMP's dated report establishes the year despite a degraded telex OCR rendering it as 1974 in the imported text. Stephen Foster, Ian Swann, Fiona Swann and Debra Stanley were named as fellow passengers and interviewed separately. They described approximately six to eight bright white lights moving rapidly from west to east. The lights seemed to form a diagonal line before breaking formation, with one impression likening them to light bulbs switching on and off. They disappeared into cloud or out across the bay after about a minute. The accounts differed significantly about height: some thought the lights lower than aircraft, while another compared them with stars. No defined outline, hull or occupants were seen, and no accompanying sound was reported. The road was hilly and sharply curved, and the observers were in a moving vehicle. The investigating officer revisited the route and saw sky reflections caused by oncoming road traffic. Heavy rain and strong wind had prevailed during the original observation. He proposed that unusually pronounced reflections under those conditions could explain the lights and concluded the report on that basis, leaving it available for further instructions. That proposed mechanism belongs beside the witness descriptions, rather than being omitted from a supposed entity encounter. The illustration retains separate white points over a wet coastal road without converting them into a solid multiwindow craft.