Barry's Disappearance

House on Walsh Street in Fort William, Ontario
This is the house my parents were living in when this incident occurred.

This incident occurred around July 1950 when my parents were living in a house on Walsh Street in Fort William. It was the sort of incident that was told and retold many times over many years and even now, my father wonders what happened that day. My mother was equally mystified by the incident right to her death.

At the time of the incident, my oldest brother Barry, was only a few weeks old. My parents had left him lying on their bed in the bedroom. When they came to check in on him, he was gone. They searched the whole house and couldn’t find him anywhere. There was no one else in the house, so they couldn’t figure out how a tiny baby would just disappear. A while later, they went back into the bedroom and found him in the exact spot they had left him on the bed.

Doug and Jean Heath with Baby Barry

I remember that when my parents told this story, sometimes my mother would also tell us about her encounter with “little green men”. I know that I often wondered if it was possible that the aliens had taken Barry and put him back without my parents detecting there presence. This was years before any of us had heard of alien abduction, so it was never a possibility that we ever talked about until recently.