First hand UFO report from 1973

Last year, my Grandfather told me about a time he saw a UFO. I have heard the story a few times, but I got him to write it all down. This is what happened, in his own words-  Encounter with Flaying Saucers?  	One evening in November 1973, I was sitting in my living room reading when the phone rang. It was the mother of my daughter’s friend that lived about 8 km north of Viking, AB. She said to get my camera and come out fast as there is strange lights moving up and down the coulees - low and slow. The animals were going wild in the area.
 	I phoned Don, who worked with me for Nova (pipe-line co) to go with me. On the way out we stopped at another farm. It was all lit up in the barn, the house and the yard. The dog was barking at the bush. We proceeded out to the friends place and they asked us in for a coffee. The TV was on and soon there was a lot of lines and static on the screen. Outside we go, sure enough there were seven orange colored lights in the south sky all in formation, roughly four miles away. I took pictures of this with a 400 mm telephoto lens. We got into the company half ton truck and headed out in the hills. I put the radio on a “no” station with the volume up and sat there waiting. Soon the radio had static. My companion looked out and up. There was a bright light right above us, roughly three or four hundred feet. How come the light appeared all of a sudden? We were looking all around, but didn’t notice it until the radio turned to static. I jumped out for more pictures. Being so close these pictures were all black. Maybe it gave off x-rays. If that’s the case why wouldn’t the whole roll be wiped out? And not just the close up ones? I don’t know.
 	This light, to describe it was like looking into a cutting torch for welding, very bright orange and blue. It soon drifted off to the east, behind some hills. There was no sound at all. When I was photographing the formation of the lights, we could see some helicopters from the Wainwright Army base coming to check this. We would see the marker lights on them. These orange lights took off in a flash when they got close.
 	Getting back into the truck, which I parked, it barely started, and that’s all. Something was running the battery down, for we could smell rotten eggs. This thing was reversing the polarity and running the battery down. Another few minutes and we would have been walking back.
 	We returned to town to a service station where the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and some people were talking about the sightings. A girl was giving her boyfriend hell for passing gas - but it was their battery. The police officer reported the same drained battery in his cruiser. The RCMP said the army base to the east, had nothing for maneuvers on and this cop had the farmer with him that owned the farm where we were. The cop, wanted to see my pictures first, but nothing turned out except the seven lights in formation at a distance.
 	Some farmers later told me their cows and horses they had run through the closed doors of the barn and into the trees. They would not come out as they could sense something out there. There was definitely something strange going on there. This gives a person a real eerie feeling.
Witness indicates that the date of the incident in November 1973 is approximate.  PD