Falcon Lake, 1967: The Prospector, the Two Discs and Canada’s Most-Documented UFO File

ARCHIVE FILE · Event year: 1967. This happened in 1967 and is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive.

CASE FILE RW-ARC-SL-029

Subject: Reported landing of a disc-shaped object and burn injury to a prospector

Dates: 20 May 1967 (event); RCMP, Canadian military and U.S. university inquiries through 1968

Location: Woods north of Falcon Lake, Whiteshell Provincial Park, Manitoba, Canada (about 49°43’N, 95°19’W per the Condon Report search area)

Status: Officially unexplained; the U.S. study found “strong doubt” about authenticity

See it first

No film of the event exists. The best way to see this case is through its paper trail and its physical evidence. Library and Archives Canada holds the federal government’s UFO records, about 9,500 digitized documents from the Department of National Defence, the Department of Transport, the National Research Council and the RCMP. Its research guide explains how to search them by location and date. The RCMP reports on Falcon Lake, linked in the sources below, are among them.

The physical items are in Winnipeg. In October 2019 a private donation brought Michalak’s burned shirt and hat, his Mayo Clinic registration card and RCMP tags into the Falcon Lake fonds at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, as University Affairs reported in February 2020. Our featured image is a public-domain Landsat view of the nearby lakes, not a photo of the site.

What happened

On Saturday, 20 May 1967, Stefan (Steve) Michalak, a Winnipeg industrial mechanic and weekend prospector, was working a quartz vein in the bush north of Falcon Lake, about 150 km east of Winnipeg. In the account summarised by the Condon Report (which calls him “Mr. A”), at about 12:12 p.m. Central Daylight Time, squawking geese made him look up. He saw two disc-shaped objects about 40 feet across descending from the southwest. One hovered. The other landed on a flat rock outcrop 160 feet away.

He said he approached the landed craft, heard what sounded like voices, and touched its side with a gloved hand, which melted. The craft then turned, and a blast from a grille-like vent on its side set his shirt and undershirt on fire and burned his upper abdomen. Both objects flew off to the southwest.

Michalak made his way to the Trans-Canada Highway. There, at about 3 p.m., he flagged down RCMP Constable Solotki of the Falcon Beach Highway Patrol. He then took a bus back to Winnipeg, where, according to later accounts, he was treated for burns as an outpatient at Misericordia Hospital. Two days later the Winnipeg Tribune ran his story under the headline “I was burned by UFO.”

Timeline

| Date | Event |

|—|—|

| 20 May 1967, ~12:12 p.m. CDT | Michalak’s reported sighting and landing near Falcon Lake |

| 20 May 1967, ~3 p.m. | He flags down RCMP Cst. Solotki on the Trans-Canada Highway |

| 22 May 1967 | Winnipeg Tribune: “I was burned by UFO” |

| 23 May 1967 | RCMP Insp. R. J. Ross orders enquiries; Cst. Zacharias interviews Michalak in Winnipeg |

| 26 May 1967 | RCMP report filed (file 67D 700-130) |

| ~27 May 1967 | A whole-body radiation count finds “no count above normal background” (per Condon Report) |

| 24–25 Jun 1967 | Michalak and a companion relocate the site and remove material from it |

| 10 Aug 1967 | RCMP follow-up report notes his actions were “inconsistent with previous arrangements” |

| Fall 1967 | Michalak files mineral claims in the area (per Condon Report) |

| 1968 | Silver metal bars said to come from the site are analysed; Condon Report published |

| 2018 | Royal Canadian Mint issues a glow-in-the-dark coin marking the case |

What believers claim

Supporters call Falcon Lake the best-documented UFO case in Canada. It has a named witness who never claimed to have met aliens, physical injuries seen by doctors, a burned shirt, a radioactive landing site, and investigations by the RCMP and the military that never produced an explanation. In 2017, his son Stan told CBC News: “If Dad hoaxed this – remember we’re talking about a blue-collar, industrial mechanic – if he hoaxed it then he was a freakin’ genius.”

What the research found

The hooks: a burned shirt, a landing site that set off radiation meters, government files on both sides of the border, and a witness who held to his story for decades.