Chris Rutkowski, a Canadian science writer and prolific ufologist has donated his collection of over 30,000 documents to the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Rutkowski has been collecting reports of UFOs since 1975. In the past 40-plus years, he has published articles and ten books on the subject of unidentified flying objects, with most of his research highlighting Canada’s history of the strange happenings.
The documents were submitted to the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections and await digitization for public access. It includes photos, research notes, reports, publications, and UFO zines the ufologist has amassed over the years.
Rutkowski donated his collection which also contains over 20,000 UFO reports documented over the past 30 years and over 10,000 UFO-related files from the Canadian government.
Quite a number of these files concern an infamous Falcon Lake incident, a UFO encounter that Rutkowski reported to be Canada’s best-documented UFO case.
According to Rutkowski, the Falcon Lake incident is more critical than Roswell because the US still does not recognize that anything happened over New Mexico.
Meanwhile, both Canadian and US authorities cannot explain the unusual Falcon Lake incident.
Reportedly, the Falcon Lake incident happened on May 20, 1967, when amateur geologist Stefan Michalak was looking for quartz near Falcon Lake in Manitoba, a Canadian province that starts over above North Dakota and stretches almost 800 miles into the frigid north.
A flock of agitated geese swopping past him startled the young researcher. The geese were purportedly fleeing from two glowing, cigar-shaped objects flying in the sky. One of these objects eventually flew off, and the other landed nearby on a rocky terrace.
Stefan Michalak drawing
Michalak decided to draw the strange craft, and those sketches are still today part of the University of Manitoba’s collection.
The young geologist, after sketching, went further to take a closer look at the strange flying object. On approaching the craft, he was scorched by hot gas that set his clothes on fire and left a grid of welts on his body.
His injuries were treated in a hospital in Winnipeg.
Michalak reported the incident to the Canadian authorities and was subjected to a psychological and physical evaluation at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, which determined him to be of sound mind.
Years after the incident, a twisted piece of metal was reportedly recovered from the Falcon Lake landing site. The metal was found to be highly radioactive in several tests. Until today, neither the US nor the Canadian military has been able to explain the event.
Rutkowski’s similar UFO sightings
The Roswell UFO Incident: W.W. “Mac” Brazel, a rancher came across a mysterious 200-yard long wreckage near an Army airfield in Roswell, New Mexico.
Local papers reported it was the remains of a flying saucer. The US military issued a statement saying that it was just a weather balloon, though the newspaper photograph suggested otherwise.
The flames of the conspiracy were further fanned in the 1950s when dummies with latex “skin” and aluminum “bones” that looked eerily like aliens fell from the sky across New Mexico and were hurriedly picked up by military vehicles. To those who believed in the earlier Roswell sightings, this seemed like a government cover-up.
Flying Saucers: This was the first well-known UFO sighting that occurred in 1947 when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane.
Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved like saucers skipping on water.
In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer.
Area 51: In the 1950s and 60s, multiple UFO sightings were reported around Area 51 in Nevada, a site used variously by the CIA, US Air Force, and Lockheed Martin to test flights of experimental aircraft or black aircraft.
Declassified documents show Area 51 was home to a Cold War program called Oxcart dedicated to creating a spy plane that would be undetectable in the air and could be used to gather information behind the Iron Curtain.
The resulting SR-71 Blackbird, F-117 Nighthawk, and Archangel-12 (A-12) traveled at speeds upwards of 2,000 miles an hour. These mysterious planes helped fuel rumors that Area 51 was used to conduct experiments on extraterrestrial life and their spacecraft.
