1967 Duhamel UFO landing marks

Case dossier

Heavy rain fell near Duhamel on Friday, 4 August 1967. The next morning, while bringing cows from a pasture, Schielke noticed the first roughly 30-foot ring. He said he had not crossed that part of the field during the previous week, did not believe in UFOs and first wondered whether unusual lightning had made it. He was the discoverer of a mark, not a witness to an object, landing or construction process.

The report spread indirectly. A neighbour told Ray Sanders, a local teacher interested in UFO reports. During the next day or two, Sanders and other visitors located three additional rings, and material was removed for a private UFO group in Edmonton. The Camrose Canadian photographed the field on 8 August and published an image the following day. By the official visit, many people and vehicles had crossed both pastures. That traffic and the early removal of material weakened the site's later evidential control.

A 9 August telex asked Canadian Forces Base Namao to assign Captain Walker to the case. Defence Research Establishment Suffield was not contacted until the morning of 11 August, when scientist G. H. S. Jones was instructed to inspect the site. He flew to Camrose in an RCAF Otter and visited the pasture with Walker, an Army photographer and a newspaper representative. Jones's memorandum cautioned that his local background summary was brief and should not be read as an endorsement of every witness or claim.

Jones documented four marks, not the six or seven rings sometimes claimed in later retellings. Three were approximately circular; the largest was slightly elliptical. The smallest measured 31 feet 9 inches across, while the ellipse measured about 34 feet 5 inches by 36 feet 3 inches. Each band was roughly 5 to 7 inches wide and only about three-quarters complete. The published memorandum did not establish a precise site layout that would justify reconstructing their spacing or orientation.

Within the bands, pasture grass was crushed or discoloured. Jones saw fresh cow dung compressed into one track and described a possible repeating pattern, about three inches long, that earlier visitors said had been clearer before traffic degraded it. He found no exhaust-blast pattern, scorching, displaced loose material or effects extending inside or outside the rings. The marks also appeared distinct from the obvious car and truck tracks made by visitors, but those observations did not uniquely identify the tool or force that produced them.

Radiation readings ranged from roughly 50 to the low 200s counts per minute and were treated as ordinary background. Jones removed very small clumps of vegetation, but the public memorandum does not present a controlled soil-chemistry study, comparative laboratory results or a complete chain of custody for material taken before the official inspection. Therefore, phrases such as 'soil tests found an anomaly' overstate the surviving record. The documented negative radiation result is firmer than any later claim about special sample composition.

The memorandum examined mechanical contact and deliberate construction without resolving either. Jones estimated that a rolling wheel would need at least one-half to three-quarters of a ton of load to leave the observed compression while following a precise circle. One ring had a central indentation; the others did not. He also calculated that a hypothetical circular support pressing at an assumed 50 pounds per square inch could imply about 270,000 pounds, or 135 tons. That number depends entirely on assumed pressure and area: it was not a scale reading, vehicle identification or confirmation that a craft landed.

Jones concluded that a hoax could neither be confirmed nor denied, that rolling contact remained possible, and that the marks were unusual in his experience. Later summaries introduced distortions: the Condon Report referred to six rings, while some popular accounts raised the number to seven and converted the conditional 135-ton calculation into a craft claim. Library and Archives Canada preserves the primary memorandum and related Camrose records. Read against that source, the cautious conclusion is limited: four durable rings were measured, but no direct witness, diagnostic test or identified mechanism connects them to an extraordinary vehicle.