By Charles Lear
In many ways, the history of UFOs in Canada parallels that of the United States. There are early historical sightings recorded in the 1600’s and 1700’s, mysterious airships in the late 1800’s and a modern era from the 1940’s on. The two countries, concerned about a possible Soviet missile attack, worked closely with each other during the Cold War, monitoring the northern areas, including the Arctic Circle, with extensive radar facilities. Official Canadian UFO policy was then influenced by the U.S. policy, which was to down play reports to the public while quietly investigating them. In later years, the Canadian government became more open about the subject and two of Canada’s most famous cases, Falcon Lake and Shag Harbour, were recently celebrated with the release of commemorative coins from the Canadian Mint. This week’s guest, Chris Rutkowski, is Canada’s foremost UFO researcher and archivist and much of the information for this blog comes from his 2006 book, co-authored with Geoff Dittman, “The Canadian UFO Report.”
In his book, Rutkowski presents what he considers is Canada’s first UFO report. In 1663, Jesuit Missionaries living among the Algonquins in what was then New France, wrote reports of numerous aerial phenomena. They reported seeing fiery serpents and balls of fire on different occasions and unusual lights during an earthquake which they described as, “pikes and lances of fire” and “burning brands” that “darted down on our houses… without, however, doing further injury than to spread alarm wherever they were seen.”
In 1792, explorer, David Thompson recorded a strange incident witnessed by himself and fellow explorer Andrew Davy in Manitoba. Thompson reported seeing a “meteor of globular form” come towards them from the night sky and they watched it as it crashed into the ice around three hundred yards in front of them “with a sound like a mass of jelly.” They went the next morning to look for a hole in the ice where they thought the object had impacted but found no sign of a disturbance.
From 1896 to 1898, the U.S. newspapers carried a large number of stories concerning large airships, often with high-powered lights, that were seen by huge numbers of people. Many people believed they were seeing new, experimental craft that were the product of an inventor in their midst or possibly even Thomas Edison. Canada also had their share of airship sightings and they too believed an inventor was responsible but there was also another speculation that involves a tragic and fascinating bit of history. On July 11, 1897, Swedish explorer, Solomon Andrée, and two companions, Nils Ekholm and Nils Strindberg (cousin of August Strindberg) left northern Norway in a hydrogen filled balloon with the intention of reaching the North Pole. For the next several months, many airship witnesses thought they might be seeing Andrée’s balloon after a successful arctic crossing. Unfortunately, Andrée and his crew disappeared and were never heard from or seen until 1930 when the captain and crew from the Norwegian sloop, the Bratvaag, found their frozen bodies on a remote island three hundred miles north of where they started.
On July 7, 1947, the same day that the story of a disc recovery in Roswell, NM appeared in U.S. newspapers, there was a story in the Winnipeg Free Press with the headline, “Mystery of the Flying Discs Deepens.” The article describes a sighting in Montreal of six silvery discs by a visiting New Jersey man, J. Duffield, a sighting by a Winnipeg local and other sightings from across Canada. Expert opinions were solicited and among them, one given by D.R.P. Coates, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada was that “some kind of flying device, still on the secret list” was being tested over Canada.
The modern era of UFOs had begun and Canada was now working closely with the U.S. establishing an early warning system using lines of radar stations across Canada starting with the Pine Tree Line along the U.S. Canadian border in the late 1940’s. This was followed in the ‘50s by the Mid Canada Line and then the Distant Early Warning Line or DEW Line in Canada’s arctic region. Because the Royal Canadian Air Force and the U.S. Air Force were working jointly, a number of Canadian UFO reports ended up in the U.S. Project Blue Book files. Many of the reports come from a base at Goose Bay in Labrador. Reports include radar tracking of objects that moved far faster or slower that any known aircraft at altitudes of as much as 45,000 feet and planes being scrambled to intercept.
It was during this time that a very unique UFO study program was established by Transport Canada directed by Wilbert Brockhouse Smith. Smith had a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia and after working on the staff of a Vancouver radio station, joined the Department of Transport of Canada in 1939 where he continued his work in broadcasting and contributed significantly to Canada’s capabilities in that field. Smith became involved in research that was concerned with the propagation of radio waves and part of this research involved geo-magnetics. Smith had developed an interest in flying saucers after reading a magazine article in the late 1940’s and became convinced that they were extraterrestrial in origin and using magnetism as a means of propulsion. Smith made a proposal to the Department of Transport that describes his beliefs and his contact with Dr. Solandt, Chairman of the Defense Research Board, who offered him facilities, personnel and funding through his organization. Smith concludes with the recommendation that the project be kept within the Department of Transport until enough data could be collected to form an assessment of the value of such work. The proposal was accepted and Project Magnet was initiated. Smith set up a flying saucer detection station in a DRB facility on Shirley’s Bay outside Ottawa in 1953 but the press got wind of it and an embarrassed D.O.T. dropped their support in 1954. In spite of this, the DRB let him continue in their facility with his own funds. Smith would later claim to be in telepathic contact with aliens and wrote to other contactees to compare notes. One of these was a Mrs. Frances Swan who claimed to be in touch with an alien called, AFFA and she became the subject of investigation by both the U.S. Air Force and C.I.A. Smith continued with his research until he died in 1962.
The Canadian government later openly collected UFO reports with the help of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in concert with the National Research Council to aid astronomers in locating downed meteorites for study. Reports were collected until 1995, at which time it was felt they were no longer necessary as there were other means of meteorite location available. Reports continued to come in and Chris Rutkowski, an astronomer himself, offered to collect them and follow them up. In 2000, Rutkowski began receiving official reports from various government agencies and amassed an enormous archive. It is noteworthy that during this period of the Canadian government’s involvement with UFOs, most of the related documents were made available at their national archives.
One of Canada’s most famous cases is the Falcon Lake Case. On May 20, 1967, near Falcon Lake, Manitoba, Stefan Michalak, an amateur geologist, was prospecting in the area when he sighted two disc-shaped craft descending in the southwest. As he watched, one of the discs stopped and hovered 15 feet above him and then one of them ascended and moved away towards the southwest changing colors from red to orange to grey until it disappeared from sight. In the meantime, the other object had landed about 160 feet away from him and was also changing colors from red to iridescent steel. Michalak got out a pad of paper and sketched the object, which he described as being 40 feet in diameter and 10 feet thick, while looking at it for nearly 30 minutes. Then a door opened and he heard high-pitched indistinct child-like voices coming from the craft and moved closer to investigate. As he got close, the light inside the craft was so bright that he needed to flip down the welding filter on the safety goggles he was wearing for his rock hammering that he’d borrowed from his job as an industrial mechanic at a cement factory. He saw no beings but described the wall of the craft revealed by the opening as being 20 inches thick and seeing lights that seemed to come from instrument panels. He moved his gloved hand along the surface of the craft and found it to be as smooth as glass but when he pulled his hand away he saw that the glove had been burned and partially melted. The door closed with three panels coming together “like a camera lens” and the craft began to move. It rose up and as it did, it released a hot gas through a grid of small circular openings that set his shirt and undershirt on fire, scorched the cap he was wearing, gave him first and second degree burns on his chest and left a pattern of small circles that matched the pattern of the openings he described that can also be seen in his drawing. The craft reached a height of around 40 feet and then vanished.
Michalak was nauseous and in shock and made his way to the highway where a passing Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer refused assistance because he thought he was drunk. Michalak made his way back to his motel and after several hours, took a bus back home to Winnipeg. In Winnipeg, he was examined by doctors and tested for radiation poisoning but the results were negative. The burns on his chest were diagnosed as being caused by heat but the grid pattern on his stomach seemed more like chemical burns. What was unexplainable was that the grid pattern would fade and then reappear every three months for close to a year and a half along with nausea and he was left with the pattern for the rest of his life in the form of subcutaneous scar tissue.
The case shows up in the Library Archives Canada because of the enormous numbers of investigators from numerous organizations that subsequently investigated the site and interviewed Michalak. Organizations include the RCAF, RCMP CID (Criminal Investigations Division) and both the federal and local Departments of Health and Welfare. Part of the official interest was due to radiation being detected at the site but that was later attributed to a source of radon known to be in the area. In 2018, the Royal Canadian Mint released a coin commemorating the event.
In 2019, the mint released a coin commemorating the Shag Harbour Incident, which involved an alleged October 4, 1967 UFO crash into the waters off the coast of Nova Scotia that was investigated by the RCMP, Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian government, and the U.S. Condon Committee. The case was revisited in 1993 by researcher, Chris Styles who introduced it to Don Ledger. The two brought the case out of obscurity with a co-authored 2001 book titled, “Dark Object” forwarded by Whitley Strieber.
There are still numerous reports of UFOs in Canada as evidenced by the data from a 2018 Canadian UFO Survey, which is the latest available compilation of sightings reports from Canadian researchers solicited by UFOlogy Research Manitoba. The people responsible for the survey are guest, Chris Rutkowski and his “The Canadian UFO Report” co-author, Geoff Dittman.