Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2023
The Extraordinary Story of Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt and her super 8mm footage of UFOs and “Beings of Light”
by: Brent Raynes
The story of Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt [September 24, 1922 – January 29, 2021] is a truly unique and profound one with potentially huge implications for the fields of science, spirituality, not to mention ufology, and potentially too for all of humankind. What began as simply yet another unexpected UFO sighting by an ordinary appearing housewife soon was followed by many additional and very bewildering sightings – sightings that would come to include other witnesses, and most significantly, unexplained images that Mrs. Izatt would again and again manage to capture on film, using a Super 8mm movie camera. And the things that she would capture on film would genuinely perplex competent researchers and photo experts, like Fred Beckman, a photo expert with the University of Chicago (IL), who was working with astronomer and former consultant to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Bluebook, Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Other photo experts who were impressed and perplexed by Izatt’s films included Stephen Geaghan, a Hollywood Production Designer, Craig Keif, a cinematographer, and Vern Miller, a photo expert with Brooks Institute.
In a recent email exchange with Dorothy Izatt’s daughter Marilyn Holt, she shared how Dr. Hynek was a “wonderful human being with an inquisitive and brilliant mind.” She also mentioned one Frank Longo too, who produced a documentary entitled Capturing the Light: The Dorothy Izatt Phenomenon (2008), available for viewing on Amazon, who she wrote did much to get her photos and stories in the public eye. “He is a remarkable human being and religiously gave Mum agreed upon royalties from the video. He was the only one, other than paranormal studios and the Japanese studios, that Mum received money from and she was happy because it helped pay the costs of her film, developing and making photographs of parts of the film.” And alas, these were not just unexplained lights and objects in the sky, but also mysterious beings! In addition, Mrs. Izatt felt she was interacting with them at a psychic, even a spiritual level. She felt she was having encounters with angelic beings, or at least beings that were “very spiritual in nature”. She came to feel that it was her mission to continue to film these mysterious lights, objects and beings and to share her footage and these inexplicable images with the world. Her encounters revolved around what she saw as light beings composed of “pure energy” that could both change their size and take any form they chose and gave off “warmth and love.”
Naturally, before I ramble on any further, I should start at the very beginning of this remarkable story. It is one involving many different people and it has many moving parts. Too many really to completely cover here in this report. It was Thursday, November 9, 1974, nearly 4 p.m. Mrs. Izatt had been looking out the living room window of her home in Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, watching the clouds move slowly across the sky. It was time for her daily devotion, her “quiet hour” that she each day would set aside for meditation. She lit a small candle on a nearby bureau and began. This time though something felt different for as she was quieting her mind she felt a “most beautiful sensation,” like nothing she had experienced before – something she described as a “great upsurge of love and happiness.” After a while it slowly went away, soon followed by an odd feeling of being watched. She walked across the room to a window and then looking skyward observed an incredible sight. She said it looked like a huge, beautiful diamond with a ring of lights spinning around its center. She described it as a very wonderful experience that evoked feelings of elation and optimism, but then just as suddenly the sensations and object disappeared. Curiously, she then turned around and walked away from the window and went about her chores.
This, however, was just the beginning. Later that same night before going to sleep, saying her prayers and meditating again, the bizarreness of that day wasn’t yet over. “All of a sudden a light appears and then there was these three men standing there,” she recalled in an interview. She was told that she was being prepared, being taught things, and how there was a lot to show her. Then they disappeared.
Dorothy Izatt had just taken her first baby steps into the strange world of the UFO contactee. Peter Guttilla, the author of Contact With Beings of Light, knew that world fairly well. He had met and known many so-called contactees, but in his opinion she was the first one he said he had found to be completely trustworthy.
Marilyn, her brother Wayne Carew and other members of the family decided to create a Facebook group back in September 2022 entitled The Authorized Story of Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt. “The reason we started the Facebook page was to try to get Mum’s real story out there and not the story that was made up or fabricated by others,” Marilyn informed me. “Mum had contacts with quite a few in the UFO community and I had a lot of correspondence between them. Mum was not technology savvy, so I handled all the correspondence between her and others. She would tell me what she wanted to say, and I would fax or email back and forth, filling her in by phone before she moved in with me. Once she was living in my home it was a lot easier to do the communications for her on a daily rather than a weekly basis. Mum lived with me for fifteen years so there were a lot of instances and discussions about her sightings and visits from beings.”
While her mom was still alive, Marilyn one day felt she had seen one of the beings. She described her personal encounter on the Facebook page in February. “I didn’t want to take away from Mum’s story, so I was reluctant to post that,” she explained to me. “I talked with my son and daughter about it and the ramifications of whether I would be taking away from Mum’s story and they both felt I wouldn’t be doing that by sharing. I checked with my two brothers to see how they felt, and they both agreed with my children, so I shared it. When I wrote up the post, I gave it to my daughter to read first. She said it was written exactly as the way I told her of the event when it happened decades before.” I am certainly glad that Marilyn shared her own story, as have others outside of the family. Here’s what she posted of this incident which she has called the “visitor in my greenhouse”:
I have been asked to elaborate on my comment about the visitor to my greenhouse. After consulting with my brother Wayne and my daughter the consensus was to go ahead and explain my comment.
This is what happened that fall day. I was in the biggest greenhouse (30’ x 90’) taking cuttings from my geraniums to propagate. I was sitting on a low stool in the aisle between the greenhouse benching that the plants were sitting on. I’m not tall so the top of my head wouldn’t be that much above the height of the plants.
A movement one aisle over, and almost halfway down, caught my eye. I looked over and saw someone wearing a large, hooded cape moving down the aisle away from me. I noticed that they were not walking and taking steps down the aisle, it looked like they were floating down the aisle - not high up in the air or anything, but just slightly above the ground. They were moving slowly and looking at my geraniums quite closely, really paying attention to them. Then they leaned over and it looked like they were going to smell them. Me being me, I blurted out loud “they don’t have a scent”. The being turned around quickly, faced where my voice came from, located me, then looked at me and abruptly vanished. One second they were there and the next second they were gone. What I noticed when they turned around was a greyish looking face with a huge, rounded forehead, narrow chin and two large dark orbs that I assumed were eyes. I couldn’t tell if there was hair or not because of the hood. I went into the house and told Mum about the incident and when I described the entity she smiled and calmly said “you had a visit from the greys.”
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A planning and marketing consultant named Jerry Mackay had read an article about Dorothy Izatt’s experiences and photos and though skeptical he was interested enough to pay her a visit to chat with her and examine her photographs. During his visit, as she was showing him some of her photos, he suddenly began to hear an unusual sound in his right ear. He recalled how she said, “You can hear that?” He replied, “Yes I can. What is it?” She told him, “They’re here.” They then walked to a window and looked outside.
“To my complete shock and amazement what appeared to be sitting right out in front of the window just to our left was a hard metallic object. I remember the feeling was so intense. It was like I was standing in a vacuum and all my hair was standing on end. And as soon as it disappeared, Dorothy let out a giggle that was like, there you go. What do you think of that?” [See attached link to edited video clip from TV’s Unsolved Mysteries, beginning at 6:52, for this interview with Mackay, along with a reconstruction of the event, and the showing of the commissioned artwork that Mackay had done to portray the UFO with windows and two antennas that they had seen.]
Here's the Unsolved Mysteries segment: https://www.facebook.com/wayne.carew/videos/827686601562819?idorvanity=1223689515076798
Dorothy Izatt had explained to investigators how her mysterious visitors would often announce themselves by either beaming a light at her or by producing a “very high-pitched piercing sound,” as Mackay had seemingly experienced. “Most people couldn’t hear it, but our dog could, and his ears would stand up,” she explained to California ufologist Peter Guttilla, the author of Contact with Beings of Light: The Amazing True Story of Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt (2003).
Often while filming, Dorothy Izatt would observe a bright flash of light now and then while filming unusual balls of light in the sky. Later when going through the video frame-by-frame she would come upon a single frame where there was a literal maze of colored light streaks that remarkably didn’t spill over into the adjacent frames. In Contact With Beings of Light, Guttilla wrote how by 1979 Dorothy had accumulated over a hundred reels and “while filming one or two lights that, to the eye, appeared to be hovering or moving slowly, a quick blinding flash of light would occur at intervals. Later, when the developed film was paused on a single frame in the projector, beautiful multi-colored, kinetic shafts of light appeared that coincided with the bright flashes seen during the filming. These trails of moving light were remarkable not only for their beauty but also for the mind-boggling speed achieved by the object or objects that produced them. Sometimes there were hundreds of instances of multi-directional movement in the time it took for a single frame of film to pass the camera’s shutter (1/18th of a second). No conventional or natural object would maneuver and change direction multiple times at that speed in such a confined area, period.”
In a brief Hard Copy segment on Dorothy Izatt she explained, “I’ve asked them to come closer and they move closer. And I’ll ask them if I can film them and they give me permission to film them.” At 2:07 she describes how she noticed “a couple of aliens” in a window of a UFO during one filming and she mentally asked them to turn the bright lights of the craft off so that she could film the beings, and that’s exactly what happened, and the video of that is shown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEIyKgM5Tt0
Marilyn was very close to her mother and has many fond memories. She concluded her communication with me thusly: “I have a photograph of her just before she died. She is sitting in her wheelchair, looking upwards at the ceiling with her hands raised and semi-cupped talking to someone. Gives me goose bumps to look at that photo.”
