The Little Green Men of Steep Rock Lake

Steep Rock Lake lies a few kilometres north of Atikokan, in northwestern Ontario. During the Second World War the lake was drained through a river diversion so its hematite iron ore could be mined in open pits. By 1950 Steep Rock Iron Mines was working those pits.

That year, flying saucers were in the air across the region. On 28 March 1950 a saucer-like craft was reported over Atikokan, heading west at great speed. The mine's editor later wrote that men in groups working at Steep Rock saw them at night, and that reports ran as far as Fort William and Port Arthur.

In September 1950 the company's mimeographed newsletter, the Steep Rock Echo, carried an anonymous piece titled "Flying Saucer Base?". Its editor, B. J. Eyton, the mine's Chief Chemist, called the author "a thoroughly reliable citizen."

The writer said that on 2 July 1950, in the dusk of the evening, he and his wife had drawn up their boat on the sandy beach of a tiny cove in Sawbill Bay. They felt a vibration. From a cleft in the rocks they looked out on the water. About a quarter of a mile away sat "two saucers, one upside down on the top of the other." Round, black-edged ports ringed the edge. Later summaries put it at about 48 feet across.

An antenna rose from the middle to about eight feet, capped with a hoop-like ring which rotated slowly. Ten figures stood on the hull, 3 ft 6 ins to 4 feet high, with a shiny metallic substance over the chest. Most wore blue caps. One wore red and seemed to lead. Their faces could not be seen. They "moved like automata, rather than living beings." One drew in lake water through a bright green hose.

The narrator returned with a friend and cameras. The boat bobbed up and down. Neither got a picture. The figures vanished into the hatches. The craft rose, tilted to about 45°, and with a rush of wind and a flash of colour it was gone, heading northward, "faster than the eye could follow."

The Echo reprinted it in October 1950, and the Port Arthur News-Chronicle and other Canadian papers picked it up. Fate magazine ran it in 1952. Harold T. Wilkins quoted it at length in 1954. Broadcaster Frank Edwards, no relation to the author, retold it on radio and in print in the 1960s. Coral Lorenzen included it in Flying Saucer Occupants in 1967. Jacques Vallée listed it as Case 80 in Passport to Magonia in 1969. The joke had become a close encounter.

In the winter of 1974 Robert T. Badgley, an APRO member from Scarborough, Ontario, wrote to the president of Steep Rock Iron Mines. The reply was plain. The story was written by a mine executive named Gordon Edwards and was "entirely fictitious and written solely for the amusement of our somewhat isolated community." Edwards had meant to mock contemporary accounts of encounters with little green men. Staff were reportedly delighted when larger media outlets picked it up.

Doubts had surfaced earlier. Lorenzen and Vallée both saw how closely it echoed the Kiehl case of August 1914 on Georgian Bay, where two small men stood on the deck of a craft resting on the water. Patrick Gross notes that at about 400 metres no one could make out a hose, or feet that change direction. Jerome Clark recorded the hoax in The UFO Encyclopedia, yet many writers kept presenting the tale as fact.

In 1992 a representative of the Atikokan Centennial Museum still called it the only documented incident they knew of. The little green men of Steep Rock Lake endure as a lesson in how a company newsletter joke can walk, stiffly, into the literature.