"CFGM - You're on the air" It was a cold winter evening in February, 1977. Chills ran down my spine as I listened intently to the penetrating beeping sound howling from my cassette tape recorder. A glance at the other two faces in the room conveyed the same message. We all suddenly realised there was a distinct possibility we were listening to a sound created by an alien intelligence.

My wife, Paula, and I waited for Tom, a local UFO investigator, to speak, but even he was speechless. All he could say was, "Man, that was really something!" It had all started rather insignificantly three-and-a-half years earlier. I had read an advertisement in one of the Toronto papers about a course on UFOs being presented by Henry McKay to be held in the fall of 1973.

Henry is one of Toronto's respected long-time UFO investigators. Since I had been interested in UFOs for many years (an interest sparked by an actual sighting in England in 1951) I decided to sign up for the course. That proved a significant decision. That fall, Henry appeared on a couple of radio phone-in programs on the subject of UFOs.

As a matter of interest I taped both of those shows. I didn't realise at the time that one of those tapes would eventually lead to a series of events so strange and exciting, so awesome and mysterious, they would be reminiscent of those created by J. R. R. Tolkien in his epic trilogy 'Lord of the Rings'.

During one show, which was live from Richmond Hill, a small town just north of Toronto, one of the telephone calls was interrupted by what at the time was assumed to be an overload signal on the station's switchboard. This signal, which manifested itself as a rapid series of loud beeps, was broadcast over the air. The only way the technician could stop the beeping was to clear all the telephone lines.

The announcer, Ron Knight, jokingly remarked that maybe it was a UFO. I thought nothing more of it at the time, and after the program was over I filed the tape with the rest of my collection. Three-and-a-half years later it was to spring back into my memory.

My wife and I were driving to work one morning and happened to tune in to a Toronto radio station when Tom was being interviewed. He was mentioning that he and several other UFO investigators had recently been experiencing a great deal of audio interference during their telephone calls, and were beginning to suspect that it was more than just coincidence. He spoke of a telephone conversation he had just had with Henry McKay, who described a live radio program he had done more than three years earlier which had been interrupted by a similar interference.

"I've got a tape of that show!" I exclaimed to my wife. "I wonder if he'd like to hear it."

Then I remembered there was also a strange telephone call on that particular program and I wanted to ask him a question about it. Luckily, Tom gave his telephone number over the air and I was able to talk to him that evening. A couple of nights later the three of us were huddled around the tape recorder in our living room.

The strange phone call I have just referred to concerns a description of a UFO sighting which was actually in progress during the course of the program. During this phone conversation Henry McKay was challenged on a point by one of the callers (there were two on the line).

Since I now feel that there is a relationship between this call and the subsequent interference, and especially since there is a definite tie-in between this call and the events of this book, I shall now present a transcript of that section of the radio program beginning with the call.