Pipestone Flyer
If you are an enthusiast of little green men, (no, not leprechauns) you may wish to relocate to Calgary, says Chris Rutkowski of Ufology Research, a Manitoba-based alien research group. Cowtown has suddenly become a hotbed for UFO sightings with 26 reported in 2011. The only other city to have more reports of unexplained aerial phenomena in that year was Toronto with a whopping 34. For those keeping score, the bronze medal for flying saucer spotting last year was awarded to Kelowna, BC with a total of 19.
The Wetaskiwin-Leduc area, however, is no stranger to UFO phenomenon. Just googling UFO Leduc or UFO Wetaskiwin will get quite a range of amateur video of strange airborne displays of supposed alien ingenuity. According to that bastion of scientific enlightenment, a website tantalizingly entitled alienexistence.com, there was even a flying saucer spotted over Calmar in 2008. Sadly, it was Calmar, Iowa. Millet, on the other hand, hosted an alien presence on July 31, 2010, as reported by The Alberta UFO Study Group. This group, according to its website, has been in business since 1989 and is headed by Jim Moroney, a self-styled “Ufologist” who apparently has a team to investigate flying alien phenomena in “selected” sites. One of these was a sighting in Falun in 2008.
The UFO Study Group site also featured a “1-800” number for anyone in the province to call should they witness strange lights in the sky, an alien spacecraft on the back lawn or, heaven forbid, some kind of paranormal posterior probing. The number listed on the site was 1-888-SEE-UFOS.
Dialing the number, however, proved somewhat disappointing. Instead of the call being picked up by a seasoned UFO hotline operator at the command centre of a UFO monitoring squad ready to deploy an investigative team, the automated voice on the line advised that you have reached the Town of St. Paul’s tourist information answering machine. St. Paul, of course, is the Alberta town that, rather than having a monstrous statue of a duck or an extremely large Ukrainian Easter egg on display to lure tourists, decided to go with an alien motif. They constructed, as a Canada centennial project in 1967, a UFO landing pad.
The only Alberta municipality that can actually prove it has had an alien visitor is Vulcan, Alberta The town once hosted famed USS Enterprise First Officer Spock who, of course, is from the planet of the same name as the municipality.