The Duhamel Alberta UFO Nests

Theoretical Alignment

Duhamel is a physical-trace case with no witness to any craft. That shapes how this case file weighs its theoretical alignment. There is no testimony to evaluate for consistency or embellishment, only a set of measured ground marks and a government scientist's own inconclusive assessment. The Psycho-Social/Mundane reading draws real strength from that assessment. Jones wrote that the marks looked "almost identical" to those of a very heavily laden rubber-tyred wheel moved in an almost complete circle, and he felt they had been made by rolling contact. The local story had also been spread quickly by a UFO enthusiast. What keeps the case from being closed is that Jones could find nothing to support a hoax. He could not see how hoaxers on rain-softened ground could have left no trace of their approach or departure, and he wrote that the marks were unique enough in his experience to reduce sharply his tendency to treat similar marks as a hoax.

Background

Duhamel is a small rural hamlet in Camrose County, central Alberta, on Highway 21, roughly 100 kilometres (62 miles) southeast of Edmonton and about 20 kilometres southwest of the town of Camrose. The settlement's roots predate its present site: a trading post originally stood two to three miles northwest of today's hamlet, on a well-used ford of the Battle River, and a church was built there in 1883 for Father Bellevaire. Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin visited it and named the settlement after Joseph-Thomas Duhamel, then Bishop of Ottawa (he became its first archbishop in 1886). In 1910 the community moved to its present site on the newly built Grand Trunk Pacific line. By 1967 Duhamel remained a small farming settlement, and Jones's report shows how quickly news of the marks travelled there: from the farmer to a neighbour, from the neighbour to a local schoolteacher, and from him to the press, an Edmonton UFO society and the CBC.

The summer of 1967 was a busy one for Canadian UFO reports, and Alberta had its share: Chris Rutkowski's Ufology Research list of significant 1967 Canadian cases includes reports from Edmonton (May), Nanton (July), Taber (September), Elnora (October) and Calgary (November) as well as Duhamel. Jones's report adds local context: there had been reports of "strange phenomena" in the Duhamel area for several weeks, including a claim, which the CFHQ inspector was to follow up, that two local girls living a mile or so away had seen a "largish, creamish" UFO bobbing up and down near the ground. Jones noted drily that this description "could be taken from any of many previously published reports." This case file treats the regional reports as context, not explanation. They do not account for a set of measured ground marks on one farm, but they do mean the discovery happened in a community already primed to read an unusual find in UFO terms. Jones made the same point: earlier "sightings" could be "a lead-in to a hoax, or be genuine."

According to Jones's report, there was heavy rain in the Duhamel area on Friday, August 4, 1967. On Saturday morning, Edgar Schielke went out to the pasture to bring in his cows. He had not been into it during the previous week, as he went there only when the cows did not come home by themselves. He immediately noticed a circular mark about thirty feet across on a patch of relatively high ground. Schielke told the inspection team that he did not believe in UFOs and that none of his equipment could have made the marks. At first he thought they might have been caused by "some strange lightning phenomenon," and he thought no more about it. That gives a formation window of roughly a week before discovery, not a single night. (Some secondary accounts, including Wikipedia's, say he had not visited the field for weeks; the report says one week.)

Schielke mentioned the mark casually to a neighbour, who said it "must be a flying saucer" and passed the story to Ray Sanders, a local schoolteacher and UFO enthusiast. In Jones's words, Sanders "became the obvious prime-mover in the growth of the story and its distribution to the Press, a UFO society in Edmonton, and in due course to the CBC." Over the next day or two Sanders and several others visited the pasture and found three more similar marks. Sanders or his party also removed sample material from the marks and reportedly shipped it to the Edmonton UFO society. Representatives of The Camrose Canadian visited the site on Tuesday, August 8, took photographs and measurements, and ran one photograph in the paper's August 9 issue. A Telex dated August 9 instructed Canadian Forces Base Namao to delegate an inspector, Capt. Walker, and to contact DRES, but DRES itself was not told until the morning of August 11.

The way the inspection came about is itself worth noting. In 1967 Canada had no dedicated UFO investigation unit. Reports were handled by the Department of National Defence and, from 1968, passed to the National Research Council. At Duhamel the Telex went from Canadian Forces Headquarters (CFHQ) to CFB Namao near Edmonton. The request to DRES came through the Defence Research Board's headquarters. Jones was flown to Camrose the same day in an RCAF Otter that happened to be operating from the DRES airstrip. Clearance for that flight took more than two hours of phone calls to arrange, and in his report Jones suggested that local charter might be a better option for future hurried trips. This was a quick, single-day inspection, as Jones himself stressed, and not an extended scientific study.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
August 4–5, 1967	Heavy rain falls in the Duhamel area on Friday, August 4. On Saturday morning, August 5, farmer Edgar Schielke goes to bring in his cows and finds a circular mark about thirty feet across on relatively high ground in his pasture. He had not been in that pasture during the previous week.
August 5–7, 1967	A neighbour passes the story to schoolteacher and UFO enthusiast Ray Sanders. Over the next day or two, Sanders and others find three more marks and remove sample material, reportedly sent to a UFO society in Edmonton.
August 8–9, 1967	The Camrose Canadian photographs and measures the marks on August 8 and publishes a photograph on August 9. The same day, a CFHQ Telex instructs CFB Namao to send Capt. Walker as an on-site inspector. Visitors drive across the pasture throughout the week.
August 11, 1967	At 0900, A.P.R. Lambert, DRES Superintendent of Logistics, acting on instructions from Defence Research Board headquarters, asks G.H.S. Jones of the Defence Research Establishment Suffield (DRES) to inspect the marks. Jones is flown to Camrose by RCAF Otter that afternoon. He inspects the site with Capt. Walker, an Army photographer and a Camrose Canadian representative, and takes beta radiation counts, which show normal background.
August 1967	Jones writes up his findings as Suffield Memorandum No. 49/67, "Onsite Inspection of Reputed UFO Landing Marks at Duhamel, Alberta." It includes his rough wheel-load and ring-base load estimates and five conclusions.
November 1967	An internal DND memo lists three Canadian cases as "unsolved": Falcon Lake, Duhamel and Shag Harbour (per Chris Rutkowski's Ufology Research summary).
1968	The University of Colorado (Condon) report notes that "six different rings were reported" at Camrose. From photographs, it judges that their appearance "did not differ markedly from tracks left by wheels of farm vehicles."
1970	Canadian UFO Report, Volume 1, No. 7, carries an account of the case (pp. 25–26).
Present	The original five-page DRES inspection report survives and has been digitized by Library and Archives Canada as part of its "Canada's UFOs: The Search for the Unknown" collection.

The Rings Themselves

The measurements in Jones's report were taken by The Camrose Canadian. Each mark was five to seven inches wide. The smallest ring was 31 feet 9 inches in diameter. Three of the rings were essentially circular ("very closely so I would say," Jones added), and the largest was slightly elliptical, at 34 feet 5 inches to 36 feet 3 inches. Jones recorded a feature many retellings leave out: each circle was incomplete on what he took to be the western side, so the rings were only about three-quarters complete. No single tyre track led away from any of the circles. The marks were mostly crushed and discoloured pasture grass. Where reasonably fresh cow dung lay in a mark, it had been compressed "in much the same way as would be done by a wheel passing over it," and the dung and grass showed traces of what might have been tread or lugs on a repeating pattern of about three inches. The inspectors were told this pattern had been clearer the weekend before.

Accounts differ on the number of rings. Jones's report, the primary source, describes four: the first one Schielke found and "three more similar marks" found by Sanders and others. Other secondary compilations give six or seven. The Condon Committee's 1968 report says "six different rings were reported" at Camrose. The Old Crop Circles research site suggests that figure may come from a misreading of the original report. This case file follows the four-ring count, because it comes from the inspector who measured the marks on site.

The report gives only a little detail about the site's layout. Jones mentions "the two pastures concerned," a first mark on "relatively high ground," and "some slight variation in the ground level" along the marks. He found that the high points were no more compressed than the low points, which was one reason he thought the marks were made by rolling contact. The Old Crop Circles site cites unpublished documents supplied by researcher Paul Fuller that say one ring "smashed through a willow fence." It also quotes a later DND memo describing the grass as "pressed down in a definite direction." This case file has not seen either document and reports both claims as attributed only.

The DRES Investigation

What sets Duhamel apart from most ground-ring reports of the era is that a named government scientist inspected it and his report survives. At 0900 on Friday, August 11, 1967, G.H.S. Jones of the Defence Research Establishment Suffield (DRES), at Ralston, Alberta, was asked by A.P.R. Lambert, DRES Superintendent of Logistics, to inspect the marks. Lambert was acting on instructions from Defence Research Board headquarters. Jones flew to the Camrose airstrip by RCAF Otter, arriving in mid-afternoon. With Capt. Walker (an Army helicopter pilot from the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps, acting as the CFHQ on-site inspector), Walker's son, an Army photographer and a representative of The Camrose Canadian, he drove to the site. Jones flew back to DRES the same evening. By then the marks had been, as he put it, "literally, a seven day wonder": droves of people had visited, many driving across the pasture and leaving car tracks in all directions. Schielke, Jones noted, seemed unconcerned by this and kept "an attitude of nonchalance towards the whole business."

DRES grew out of the Experimental Station Suffield, set up during the Second World War on the large Suffield range in southeastern Alberta, mainly for chemical and biological weapons research and testing. In 1967 it was one of the Defence Research Board's laboratories. Jones's report does not give his specialty, and it does not describe any laboratory work. His analysis was a field examination plus a back-of-envelope load estimate, which he openly called "rough calculations." The report should be read in that light: a careful but quick inspection by a scientist sent at short notice, not a formal soil-mechanics study.

Jones admitted to "a first impression of disappointment that I had been brought so far to look at so little," but said that "detailed study of the marks and reflection leave me more than a little puzzled." Despite a week of visitors and more heavy rain early in that week, the marks were still clearly impressed in the ground. They were uniform in width and far more sharply impressed than the car and truck tracks made since their discovery, and they "stood out in quite sharp contrast" to those tracks. He found no effect of any kind outside the track itself, inside or outside the circles: "No exhaust blast, no scorching, no disturbance of the loose surface material." Within the track, small thumbnail-sized clumps of vegetation appeared to have been removed. He took beta radiation counts in the circles, over the tracks and away from them. These ranged from the low fifties to the high 200s counts per minute, which he called "effectively normal background." He took no soil samples himself. The only samples mentioned in the report are those removed earlier by Sanders's party.

The Weight Calculation

The best-known figure from the case, 135 tons, needs to be read in context. Jones considered two possibilities. First, he took the marks to be made by a wheel. He reckoned the load per unit area needed was roughly three times that of a truck tyre, and that hoaxers would have to "induce a wheel loaded to roughly half to three quarters of a ton to move in a virtually exact circle." That could be done with a single wheel on a rigid radius arm turning about a fixed centre. Only one circle had a small dent at its centre. Two wheels on a pivoted axle over 30 feet long "seems unlikely," he wrote, and a motorcycle rider circling would have left single tracks, which there were none of. Second, he took the UFO possibility: "something coming vertically down onto a relatively narrow ring support - either metal, or, a faint possibility, a flexible skirt."

For the second case Jones used what he called rough calculations. He assumed 500 lb per truck wheel on a contact patch of four by two inches, or just under 63 psi, and reduced this to 50 psi, which he considered "the absolute minimum needed to produce the visible marks." A ring 30 feet across with an average width of five inches has a contact area of 5,400 square inches. At 50 psi that gives 270,000 lb. In his words: "This load of 135 tons would be in right ball park for a large aircraft, or presumably, small space craft." In his formal conclusions he put the figure as "at least 100 tons and possibly nearer two hundred tons." This case file notes that the arithmetic is simple and openly approximate. The 50 psi threshold was Jones's judgement, not a measured soil property, and he took no penetrometer readings or compression-depth measurements.

The two estimates answer different questions, and popular retellings often merge them. The 135-ton figure applies only if one assumes an object sat on a full ring-shaped base. On the wheel hypothesis, which matched Jones's own impression that the marks were made by rolling contact, the load required was about half to three-quarters of a ton on a single wheel. A purpose-built rig could carry that. The problem Jones saw with a wheel was not the weight but the precision of the circles and the lack of any approach or departure tracks on soft ground. The ring-base hypothesis has its own difficulty, one this case file notes: the rings were only about three-quarters complete, so an object on a continuous circular base does not straightforwardly fit them either.

An Independent Review: The Condon Report

Duhamel did not remain solely a Canadian government matter. The United States Air Force-funded University of Colorado UFO Project, chaired by physicist Edward Condon and published in 1968 as Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects — the document this catalogue's own Condon Report case file covers in full — took up the Camrose rings within its own chapter on direct physical evidence. The Committee's own text states plainly: "Reports of ring imprints are not uncommon. Four cases, involving ring imprints generally about 30 ft. in diameter and 6–12 in. wide were reported in August and September, 1967, in three different Canadian provinces. In Camrose, Alberta six different rings were reported. Photographs of the Camrose rings were received by this project for evaluation." The passage shows that the case reached the American project, which received photographs. Its count of six rings, rather than the four in Jones's report, is the earliest published source for the higher figure.

The Condon Report leaned toward the mundane. Noting that UFO origin of markings is often assumed even when no UFO was seen, it wrote that "this was true of the Camrose rings, whose appearance did not differ markedly from tracks left by wheels of farm vehicles." That judgement was made from photographs, not an on-site visit. It is not far from Jones's own description: he too said the marks looked "almost identical" to those of a very heavily laden rubber-tyred wheel. Where they differ is that Jones, standing in the field, found the marks "strikingly different from truck tracks," more uniform and more sharply impressed. He also could not explain how a vehicle had reached and left the circles without leaving tracks.

Key Witnesses

The Five Observables Assessment

The Five Observables framework, built around reported flight and propulsion behavior, has limited application to a case with no witnessed craft or flight behavior of any kind — only a static ground trace inspected after the fact.

Assessment: This case's evidentiary weight rests entirely on physical ground-trace analysis, not on any observed craft behavior. Its closest evidentiary comparison within this catalogue is to other landing-trace cases, such as the Tully Saucer Nests and the Langenburg UFO/Saucer Nests, rather than to any radar-visual or close-encounter case with an actual witnessed object.

Evidence Assessment

Weighing Duhamel requires holding two genuinely competing readings of the same single document in view simultaneously: Jones's own report contains real evidence pointing in both directions, and this case file's assessment reflects that internal tension rather than resolving it artificially toward either a confident vindication or a confident dismissal.

Why "Disputed"

The Disputed rating reflects a formal government inspection whose author could not settle the question. Jones thought the marks were most likely made by rolling contact, but he could find nothing to support a hoax, could not see how hoaxers had come and gone on soft ground without leaving tracks, and wrote that the marks were unusual enough to shift his view of similar cases. The rating stops short of Credible because no one saw anything at the site, the inspection came a week late after heavy traffic across the pasture, Jones's own leading interpretation was a wheel, and his load estimates were rough.

What makes the case unusual is that the tension sits inside one contemporaneous official document. Many disputed cases set a witness against a later skeptic. Here a single inspector, writing within days, recorded evidence that points both ways: the marks resemble a heavily loaded wheel track, yet they differ sharply from nearby vehicle tracks and show no route in or out. That gives some confidence that the ambiguity reflects the site itself rather than a later dispute between parties with different information.

Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile

No radar, photographic or other instrumented detection of any craft exists for this case. The whole record is a post-hoc field inspection: ring dimensions measured by the local newspaper, Jones's visual examination, beta radiation counts and his rough load estimates. That is an inherent limit of a physical-trace case. A static ground mark found after the fact offers no chance of the real-time sensor correlation that radar-visual case files rely on. An Army photographer accompanied the inspection, and The Camrose Canadian had photographed the marks on August 8, so photographs were taken, but none from the inspection have been located by this case file.

The only instrument Jones reports using is a beta radiation counter. The readings ranged from the low fifties to the high 200s counts per minute, about 100 cpm on average, both on and away from the tracks. He called this "effectively normal background." He did not report penetrometer readings, compression-depth measurements or any laboratory testing. His load estimates rest on an assumed truck-tyre contact pressure, not on measurements of the soil.

Environmental & Geospatial Context

Rain matters to this case in more than one way. Jones records heavy rain on Friday, August 4, and more heavy rain early in the following week. ERA5 reanalysis for the area (Open-Meteo) shows about 1.3 mm on August 4 and 15.8 mm on August 5 by local day. Reanalysis is coarse, though, and the inspector's contemporaneous account is the better guide to timing. Soft ground takes impressions readily, which is why Jones thought a hoaxer could hardly have worked there without leaving tracks. Soft ground is also easier for an ordinary loaded wheel to mark, and he noted that a week's recovery of the ground could confuse the evidence. This case file leaves that tension unresolved.

Camrose County lies in Alberta's aspen parkland, a transition zone between the drier southern prairie and the boreal forest, with rolling terrain and mixed grain and cattle farming. Schielke's account fits that picture: the pasture held his cows, and he visited it only when they failed to come home on their own. That explains how marks could sit unnoticed for up to a week before discovery.

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

The record rests on two people. Edgar Schielke was a working farmer who found the first mark and denied that his equipment could have made it. G.H.S. Jones was a DRES scientist who inspected the site and wrote the report. Jones was careful to protect his informants. He warned that the placing of names next to comments "must not be taken as reflecting my opinion of the veracity or reliability of individual 'witnesses'." Even so, he noted that the farmer's casual attitude while his farm became a scene of much visiting, together with the speed with which the media were informed, meant that "one must consider the possibility of a deliberate hoax." He added that such a hoax "need not have been perpetrated by any individual who has become obvious in the investigation," and that he could find nothing to support the idea.

Schielke's reported skepticism and his quick denial that his equipment was involved count for something, but this case file does not treat them as conclusive. Jones recorded them without comment. A third person, the schoolteacher Ray Sanders, found the other three marks, shaped the story's spread and removed sample material before any official inspection. Nothing in the record suggests wrongdoing by anyone named. But anyone weighing the hoax hypothesis has to account for the fact that the person who discovered three of the four marks was also a committed UFO enthusiast.

The record also has gaps. Capt. Walker was to obtain detailed reports from local people, including the two girls' sighting, but his findings have not been located by this case file. Neither has the later DND memo cited by the Old Crop Circles site, or the fate of the samples Sanders's party sent to Edmonton. Nothing in the material reviewed shows a second scientific inspection.

Physical & Material Assays

The four rings are the case's central physical evidence. Their narrow, uniform five-to-seven-inch width, their close circularity and the missing quarter of each circle are their most distinctive features. The only test Jones reports is a beta radiation count, which was normal background. Sanders's party removed sample material and reportedly shipped it to a UFO society in Edmonton. No result from those samples appears in the record reviewed for this case file.

A clean radiation count does not rule much in or out. An object or device that simply pressed the ground mechanically would not be expected to leave radioactivity. Jones's survey therefore answers only the narrow question of whether there was a radiation anomaly, and the answer was no. Later physical-trace investigations sometimes ran soil chemistry, germination and moisture-repellence tests, but none of these were done at Duhamel as far as the surviving report shows.

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

Duhamel belongs to a small, internationally recognized cluster of mid-to-late-1960s "saucer nest" ground-trace cases this catalogue has separately documented in its own Tully Saucer Nests case file (Queensland, Australia, January 1966) and its Langenburg UFO/Saucer Nests case file (Saskatchewan, Canada, September 1974) — the latter sharing not only a broadly similar physical-trace profile but the same country and a broadly comparable prairie agricultural setting, seven years and one province apart. This case file finds the Langenburg comparison particularly instructive: both Canadian cases involved a working farmer's discovery of ring-shaped ground marks with no witnessed craft, both drew formal government or law-enforcement investigation, and both ultimately resisted a fully confident conventional explanation despite genuine, good-faith official efforts to find one. That two broadly similar cases occurred within the same country's agricultural heartland within a single decade is, on this case file's own reading, either evidence of a genuine recurring phenomenon with a shared underlying cause, or evidence that the same general category of hoax or misidentification recurs independently wherever the right combination of rural setting, soft ground, and media appetite for a saucer story exists — a question this catalogue's own case files do not claim to resolve definitively for either Duhamel or Langenburg individually.

Duhamel also occurred less than three months after this catalogue's own Falcon Lake Incident, the close-encounter case involving prospector Stefan Michalak in southeastern Manitoba, near the Ontario border, on May 20, 1967, and within the same broader 1967 period as the well-known Shag Harbour incident off Nova Scotia that October — making 1967 a genuinely dense year for high-profile Canadian UFO cases spanning physical-trace, close-encounter, and crash/splashdown categories within a single twelve-month span, all drawing some form of official Canadian government attention. This case file finds that density itself worth noting as context: 1967 was Canada's centennial year, a period of unusually intense national media attention and civic activity across the country, which this case file treats as plausibly relevant to why several genuinely independent cases from unconnected regions of Canada each received a comparatively high level of press coverage and, in Duhamel's and Falcon Lake's cases, formal government investigation. A November 1967 DND memo grouped Falcon Lake, Duhamel and Shag Harbour together as "unsolved."

The broader international "saucer nest" phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s, which Tully, Langenburg, and Duhamel all belong to, would later become entangled, in the public imagination and in some skeptical literature, with the far more extensively documented English "crop circle" phenomenon that emerged in the 1970s and expanded dramatically through the 1980s and 1990s — a later phenomenon this catalogue's own research treats as a substantially different evidentiary category, since a large proportion of English crop circles from the 1990s onward were eventually traced to confirmed human hoaxers (most famously Doug Bower and Dave Chorley) using simple plank-and-rope flattening techniques. This case file notes that later confirmed hoax history as directly relevant background for evaluating the conventional-explanation candidates below, while also noting that Duhamel predates the well-documented English hoaxing wave by several years and involved narrow, sharply impressed bands that its inspector likened to a heavily laden wheel track, a different kind of mark from the broad flattened areas of later plank-and-rope circles.

The broader academic cataloguing of "saucer nest" and ground-ring cases like Duhamel owes much to Ted Phillips, who in 1975 published Physical Traces Associated with UFO Sightings: A Preliminary Catalog through the Center for UFO Studies — a systematic attempt to compile and cross-reference ground-trace reports of exactly this kind from around the world, and the foundation of the physical-trace research tradition Phillips continued to direct for decades afterward. This case file was unable to independently confirm whether Duhamel appears as a numbered entry in Phillips's own 1975 catalog specifically, and does not assert that he personally investigated this case; his broader methodological framework, however — treating ground-trace evidence as a distinct, physically measurable evidentiary category worthy of systematic catalog treatment, rather than folding it indiscriminately into witness-testimony-based case files — is directly relevant to how this case file itself treats Duhamel's own evidentiary record throughout.

Material Analysis

The case's material record is thin. The four rings have long since grown over. The samples removed by Sanders's party have not been traced. What survives is Jones's five-page Suffield Memorandum No. 49/67 and the press coverage. The Camrose Canadian ran a photograph on August 9, 1967, and an Army photographer accompanied the August 11 inspection. The Condon project also received photographs of the "Camrose rings." None of these photographs has been located by this case file in a verifiable, rights-clear form.

The inspection report itself is publicly available through Library and Archives Canada's "Canada's UFOs: The Search for the Unknown" collection. Those government UFO files, many of them received by the National Research Council from 1968, are among the more accessible national UFO archives. That is why a case like Duhamel can be checked against its primary document rather than against retellings, which have drifted from it in several respects.

The Conventional Explanation Candidate: An Agricultural or Improvised Hoax Mechanism

The most commonly proposed conventional explanation is a mechanically produced mark: a wheel or vehicle run in a circle, an improvised rig pivoted about a stake, or livestock circling a fixed point. Jones's own report points most strongly at the first. The marks looked like those of a heavily laden tyred wheel, and the compressed dung suggested rolling contact. Against it, he found that the circles were nearly exact, that only one had a dent at its centre, that no single track led in or out across soft ground, and that a wheel would need about half to three-quarters of a ton of load. That last point is a matter of rigging, not an impossibility.

Livestock Trampling

Cattle and other livestock repeatedly circling a fixed point (a feed trough, a salt lick, a stake) over an extended period can produce a genuine, naturally occurring ring-shaped trampled area in a pasture, a phenomenon well documented independent of any UFO context. This case file finds this candidate weak here. The bands were narrow and sharply defined, with possible tread marks, and the report mentions no feed source, salt lick or other attractant at the centre of any ring.

Deliberate Hoax

A deliberate hoax remains possible, and Jones said so: "I believe such a track could be produced by a deliberate hoax, but the hoaxers would require some equipment and a great deal of determination." He was explicit that a hoaxer need not be anyone prominent in the story. Against a hoax, he could find no supporting evidence, and he could not see how anyone working on very soft ground could have made the marks "in isolation, without leaving some evidence of their approach to the area and departure from it." For it, he cited the earlier local "sightings," the discovery of three more marks by a UFO enthusiast, the farmer's casual air and the speed with which the media were told.

Heavy Agricultural Equipment

A third candidate is a real vehicle or machine. Jones considered a single wheel on a rigid radius arm about a fixed centre (possible, but only one circle had a centre mark), two wheels on a pivoted axle over 30 feet long ("unlikely"), and a motorcycle rider circling several times (no single tracks anywhere in the field). Each fits the tyre-like appearance, but all run into the same problems: the near-exact circles, the missing quarter of each ring and the absence of any track leading to or from them.

Agricultural or Improvised Hoax Mechanism — Plausibility Rating: INCONCLUSIVE

Fairy Ring Fungal Growth

A conventional explanation distinct from any mechanical or hoax mechanism, and one this case file weighs directly rather than folding into the hoax candidates above, is fairy ring fungal growth — a well-documented, naturally occurring phenomenon in which soil fungi such as Marasmius oreades spread outward from a central point through an underground network of hyphae, producing a genuinely circular band of altered turf as the advancing fungal mat consumes organic matter and releases nitrogen and phosphorus into the surrounding soil. Fairy rings are common across the temperate grasslands of North America, including central Alberta's own parkland belt, and can range from a few feet to well over a hundred feet in diameter, growing outward by a measurable amount each year as the fungal mat's living edge continues to expand while its own exhausted center dies back.

This case file finds the fairy-ring candidate only a partial fit for Duhamel's own specific evidence. A fungal ring typically manifests as a band of discolored or dead turf, sometimes bordered by a darker green band of stimulated growth from the released nutrients, and sometimes by a visible ring of mushroom fruiting bodies — a gradual, biologically driven process that unfolds over a growing season or several, not a mark that appears overnight during a single period of heavy rain. Jones's own report describes vegetation flattened or physically removed within a narrow, uniform five-to-seven-inch band, not the discolored or dead-turf banding a fairy ring produces, and nothing in the surviving record describes mushroom fruiting bodies at the site, a detail this case file would expect a trained on-site investigator to note had it been present. Most significantly, a fairy ring's slow biological growth process offers no mechanism for producing the ground compression underlying Jones's own weight-load calculation. This case file accordingly treats fairy-ring growth as a real, well-documented phenomenon worth naming and weighing explicitly, precisely because "saucer nest" and crop-circle literature has at times conflated it with other, mechanically produced ring marks, but not as a strong candidate for Duhamel's own specific physical evidence.

Wildlife Bedding and Ring-Running Behavior

This case file also weighs wildlife behavior as a conventional-explanation candidate distinct from the livestock-trampling candidate considered above, since Camrose County's own parkland-belt habitat supports substantial white-tailed deer and mule deer populations alongside Schielke's own domestic livestock. Deer and other wild ungulates are well documented to bed down repeatedly in the same sheltered locations, flattening vegetation into a distinctive oval depression through repeated use, and some deer are separately documented to engage in what wildlife observers term "ring-running" — repeatedly circling a fixed feature such as a tree, stump, or shrub, most often during the autumn rut, wearing a visible circular or figure-eight track into the ground through repeated passage.

This case file finds the wildlife-behavior candidate a weaker fit for Duhamel than for some other reported "nest" cases, for reasons distinct from those weakening the livestock-trampling candidate above. Documented deer ring-running behavior is overwhelmingly associated with a fixed central object, most commonly a tree or shrub, that the animal orbits; none of the surviving descriptions of the four Duhamel rings mention a tree, stump, or other central feature within any ring's interior, and the rings' own reported diameters, 31 to 36 feet, are considerably larger than the smaller circles typically documented around a single fixed point. A bedding explanation fares no better on its own terms: a bedding depression is an irregular oval formed by a single animal's own body, not a precise, narrow, continuously circular band. This case file accordingly discloses wildlife behavior as a real, biologically documented phenomenon worth naming explicitly, consistent with this catalogue's general practice of weighing mundane explanations on their actual merits rather than defaulting only to the exotic interpretation, while concluding it fits Duhamel's own specific, measured evidence less well than it might fit a less precisely documented case elsewhere.

Fairy Ring Fungal Growth & Wildlife Bedding/Ring-Running — Plausibility Rating: LOW

Related Cases

Further Reading — Recommended Literature

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Essential Viewing

Sources

• "Onsite Inspection of Reputed UFO Landing Marks at Duhamel," Defence Research Establishment Suffield, Library and Archives Canada. bac-lac.gc.ca
• "Canada's UFOs: The Search for the Unknown," Library and Archives Canada (declassified document database). collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/ufo
• "Duhamel, Alberta," Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhamel,_Alberta
• "UFO Sightings in Canada," Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_Canada
• "UFOs in Canada," The Canadian Encyclopedia. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca
• "Significant Canadian UFO Cases in 1967," Ufology Research. uforum.blogspot.com
• "North America 1967 Camrose," Old Crop Circles. oldcropcircles.weebly.com
• "Crop Circle," International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). internationalflyingsaucerbureau.com
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• "Learn Duhamel, Alberta Facts for Kids," Kiddle. kids.kiddle.co
• "Defence Research Establishment Suffield," Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Research_Establishment_Suffield
• Chris A. Rutkowski, Canada's UFOs: Declassified, August Night Press, 2022.
• Chris A. Rutkowski, A World of UFOs, Dundurn Press, 2008.
• Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, Henry Regnery Company, 1969.
• Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., Omnigraphics, 2018.
• Edward U. Condon (dir.), Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects ("The Condon Report"), University of Colorado, 1968, Section III, Chapter 3, "Direct Physical Evidence." files.ncas.org/condon/text/s3chap03.htm
• Ted Phillips, Physical Traces Associated with UFO Sightings: A Preliminary Catalog, Center for UFO Studies, 1975.
• "Duhamel, Joseph-Thomas," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, on the settlement's namesake (Bishop of Ottawa from 1874, archbishop from 1886). biographi.ca
• Jones, G.H.S. "Onsite Inspection of Reputed UFO Landing Marks at Duhamel, Alberta," Suffield Memorandum No. 49/67, Defence Research Establishment Suffield, 1967 (5 pp.; Internet Archive copy of the LAC PDF, captured 19 Sept. 2024). web.archive.org
• NASA JPL Horizons, observer ephemeris for the Moon from 52.883°N, 112.9°W, August 4–6, 1967 (illumination about 1% on August 5). ssd.jpl.nasa.gov
• Open-Meteo Historical Weather API (ERA5), daily precipitation for 52.88°N, 112.9°W, August 3–11, 1967. open-meteo.com
• Chalker, Bill. "The 1966 Tully Saucer 'Nest' — A Classic UFO Physical Trace Case," Project 1947, 1997. project1947.com

Corrections (October 2026)

A fact-check against G.H.S. Jones's inspection report itself (Suffield Memorandum No. 49/67, read via the Internet Archive copy of the Library and Archives Canada PDF) found that the earlier version of this page misdescribed the investigation in several important ways. The page said Jones took and tested soil samples. He took none; he took beta radiation counts, which were normal background, and the only samples were removed by a local UFO enthusiast. The page also presented the 135-ton figure as Jones's finding that the marks needed a mass beyond any farm equipment. In fact it was a rough worked example under a UFO-on-a-ring-base hypothesis. Under his wheel hypothesis, which matched his own impression of rolling contact, he estimated only about half to three-quarters of a ton. The page said Schielke and his neighbours found the other three rings. The report says schoolteacher and UFO enthusiast Ray Sanders and others found them. It omitted that each ring was only about three-quarters complete.

Following this review, the rating was changed from Disputed 48 to Disputed 40 (October 27, 2026), because the higher rating had rested partly on claims corrected or removed above.

Other corrections: Schielke had not been in the pasture for one week, not "some time" or weeks. The rain recorded is Friday, August 4. Suffield Memorandum No. 49/67 is the inspection report itself, not a later compilation. Canadian UFO Report Vol. 1 No. 7 dates from 1970, not 1968. The Camrose Canadian coverage of August 9 is confirmed by the report, which also shows that the paper took the ring measurements. Jones's quotation reads "in right ball park for a large aircraft, or presumably, small space craft." Falcon Lake is in Manitoba, not Ontario. Unsupported material was removed: a gift of the parish bell from Ottawa (Duhamel was Bishop, not yet Archbishop, of Ottawa in 1883), a "sloping ground" detail, the claim that DRES specialised in soil mechanics, the "documented Alberta UFO wave," and the Lunar figure based on hand calculation (now from JPL Horizons). The willow-fence detail is now attributed to unpublished documents cited by Old Crop Circles. A Further Reading card titled "The 1996 Tully Saucer 'Nest'" with an unrelated Amazon link was corrected to Bill Chalker's 1997 Project 1947 article on the 1966 case. Rutkowski's Canada's UFOs: Declassified is published by August Night Press (2022), not Dundurn.