The UFO landing pad of St. Paul
The account
A small prairie town built the world's first landing pad for ships from other planets.
What investigators found
The pad is real, but it began as a civic and tourism project for Canada's centennial, not because of any sighting.
The story
In 1967, the year of Canada's centennial, the small town of St. Paul, Alberta, organized dozens of commemorative projects. The most famous was a raised concrete platform, with a map of the country made of stones sent by every province, billed as the world's first official UFO landing pad. It was opened on June 3, 1967, by Minister of National Defence Paul Hellyer, who arrived by helicopter.
The sign beside it declares the area international, as a symbol of the hope of keeping space free of war. No flying saucer ever landed there, but the pad became a tourist attraction, was visited by Queen Elizabeth II in 1978 and is listed by Guinness as the first of its kind. Curiously, Hellyer would become, decades later, an advocate of the idea that UFOs are real.