The Falcon Lake Incident

Stefan Michalak was 50. He was a Polish-born industrial mechanic from Winnipeg, and an amateur prospector. On the Victoria Day long weekend of 1967 he was alone on the rocks north of Falcon Lake, in Whiteshell Provincial Park, looking for quartz and silver veins.

Around midday, geese nearby raised an alarm. Michalak looked up. Two objects were descending, "glowing with an intense scarlet glare." One "stopped dead in the air," hovered for about three minutes, then lifted away. The other landed on a flat rock about 160 feet away.

It was about 40 feet across, with a dome on top. Its colour shifted from red through grey, and finally to "the colour of hot stainless steel, with a golden glow." Purple light shone from apertures around the dome. For about 30 minutes he watched and sketched. He heard a whirring like a fast electric motor, and a hissing. He felt waves of warm air. He smelled sulphur.

A hatch opened. The light inside was too bright to see anything. He heard two humanlike voices, one higher than the other, and called out in several languages. No answer came. He touched the hull with a gloved hand. The fingertips of the glove melted.

The hatch closed. The craft rotated counterclockwise. A blast from a grid-like vent burned his upper abdomen and set his shirt on fire. It vanished on a bearing of 255 degrees.

He was nauseated, with a strong headache. He broke out in a cold sweat and began vomiting. At Misericordia Hospital in Winnipeg the burns were recorded as first-degree. He later reported losing 13 lb in three days. The burn pattern returned roughly every three months for about 14 months.

The RCMP, the RCAF, the Department of National Health and Welfare and the National Research Council all took part. The first RCAF search could not find the site. A radiation survey later found traces only in a small rock crevice. About a year on, nearly pure silver bars turned up in a crack in the rock. The Condon Committee filed it as Case 22 and concluded it did "not offer probative information regarding inconventional craft." Defence Minister Léo Cadieux declined to release the report publicly. The Department of National Defence classes the case as unsolved.

Doubts came early. Hotel staff said Michalak had several beers the night before. RCMP Constable G.A. Solotki thought he was hung over, though he "did not smell alcohol." The neat grid of marks photographed in January 1968 looked very different from the blotchy burns of May 1967. A Mayo Clinic psychiatrist called the lesions "obviously factitial," yet found "no evidence of delusions, hallucinations." Peter Millman of the NRC suggested the silver had been dipped in pitchblende.

Michalak himself came to believe the craft was most likely an experimental aircraft. Chris Rutkowski, who has written on the case since 1980, put it plainly: "There is no question that something very unusual occurred on May 20th, 1967, north of Falcon Lake."

Michalak died in 1999. His son Stan, who was 10 at the time, co-wrote When They Appeared with Rutkowski. In 2018 the Royal Canadian Mint issued a glow-in-the-dark silver coin for the encounter. In 2019 the burned undershirt, the cap and other items went to the University of Manitoba Archives. As Stan put it: "If Dad hoaxed this… he was a freakin' genius."