Northeast of Edmonton, roughly two and a half hours up Highway 28, there is a raised concrete platform roughly twelve metres across that has never been used for its intended purpose. Not once. Not in fifty-nine years. The town of St. Paul, Alberta, built it in 1967 as an official landing pad for visiting spacecraft from other worlds, and the spacecraft have, without apparent exception, chosen to land somewhere else.
The platform weighs better than 130,000 kilograms. It sits on a single central concrete pedestal — approximately 2.4 metres tall, thick enough to anchor 130 tons of deck overhead — at the corner of 50th Avenue and 53rd Street. The space underneath is open, shaded, and designated by the town as international territory, which is either a charming diplomatic gesture or the loneliest international border crossing in the country, depending on your mood. On the back of the structure, someone assembled a map of Canada out of stones gathered from each of the provinces, which was a considerable amount of effort for something whose primary users have declined to show up. Underneath the deck, a time capsule waits.
It will be opened in 2067.
Whoever opens it will have some explaining to do.
This is the world's first official UFO landing pad — Guinness has the paperwork — and it is, by any reasonable measure, the most successful thing in human history that has never once functioned.
The idea came from the centennial.
Canada was turning a hundred years old in 1967, and the federal government had money for commemorative projects. Communities from Newfoundland to British Columbia submitted proposals. Some built hockey rinks. Some built parks. In St. Paul, the mayor — a man named Jules Van Brabant — proposed a UFO landing pad, and the federal Centennial Commission said yes, which tells you something about the spirit of the times and possibly about the review process.
Van Brabant was not exactly joking. Or rather, he was joking the way people joke when they also mean it — a civic wink that somehow involved real concrete and a real budget and a real local artist named Margo Legacy working on the design. Edmonton engineer Alex Mair drew up the plans and the construction came in at $14,000, which is a reasonable price for a mushroom-shaped concrete structure nobody had ever tried to build before. What went up was a raised circular deck perched on one substantial central pedestal, open to the sky, waiting. On completion it became item number sixty-five on a list of exactly one hundred Centennial projects St. Paul organized that year.
A hundred projects. For a small farming community on the Alberta plains. Either Jules Van Brabant was the most energetic mayor in the province's history, or he was the most optimistic, or possibly the same thing had two names.
June 3, 1967. Grand opening.
Canada's Minister of National Defence, Paul Hellyer, flew in by helicopter to cut the ribbon. This is worth sitting with. The federal cabinet minister responsible for the country's military readiness against hostile forces arrived to formally welcome, on behalf of the Government of Canada, whatever alien civilization might choose to land in northeastern Alberta. He stepped off the helicopter, declared the site open, and the federal government simultaneously designated St. Paul the Centennial Capital of Canada, which is not a title that has ever been fully explained.
Someone had arranged for space sounds to be piped near the pad. A local bus called the Martian Express shuttled visitors around. Restaurants were running Saturn Salads and Martian Burgers, on the theory that whatever crossed the galaxy to visit St. Paul would be hungry. The afternoon sat somewhere between official ceremony and community fever dream — except the concrete was real and the minister was real and the designation was real, and when Hellyer flew back to Ottawa he apparently thought nothing more of it.
He would, eventually, think more of it.
Near the pad, a sign was installed declaring the site neutral ground, open to all peoples from anywhere, with their acceptance assured. The Martian Express did not make a return trip from space. The Saturn Salads were almost certainly consumed by earthlings.
Nothing landed that summer. In the fifty-nine years since, nothing verifiable has come down on it either. But the town kept going, because what else do you do.
In 1990, a saucer-shaped tourist information centre opened beside the pad — round roof, curved walls, architecturally committed to the theme even though the theme had not yet produced results. Inside, exhibits went up on UFO sightings, crop circles, cattle mutilations, photographs from alleged landing sites around the world. A local businessman named Paul Pelletier set up a toll-free reporting hotline in 1995. The number was 1-888-SEE-UFOS. You could call it to report extraterrestrial activity. It still works. If you have seen something, they would like to know.
July 1998. A proper conference, two days, July 10 and 11, organized by Pelletier. Somewhere between 300 and 500 people showed up — the attendance figures depend on whether you count registrations or bodies in chairs — most of them driving from Edmonton or beyond. Canadian ufologist Chris Rutkowski was one of the speakers. After the conference ended, John Timmerman of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies donated the entire CUFOS traveling exhibit to the St. Paul tourism office. Timmerman had been hauling it through shopping malls from Seattle to Nova Scotia for roughly twelve years, collecting firsthand accounts from people who stopped in to have a look. The tour was winding down and the exhibit had to go somewhere. St. Paul was ready.
J. Allen Hynek, who had founded the organization and whose name was on everything in it, had died in 1986. Before that he had spent years as the U.S. Air Force's official scientific consultant on Project Blue Book, which was the military's investigation into UFO reports — the operating philosophy of which appeared to be finding reasons not to take any of it seriously, which Hynek eventually stopped doing. His materials were now in a round building in northeastern Alberta beside a concrete pad nobody had used. You go where you're wanted.
Then there was Hellyer.
He had moved to the Transport portfolio on September 18th of that year — 1967, three and a half months after opening the pad — when Pearson shuffled the cabinet. He served through the Pearson and Trudeau years in various roles. He did not, in any documented interview from this period, express particular concern about extraterrestrial visitation. He appeared, for roughly four decades, to be a man who had opened a UFO landing pad the way you open a library or a community centre — scissors, handshaking, brief remarks, then back to Ottawa.
And then in September 2005, at the age of eighty-two, he stood up in Toronto and stated publicly that extraterrestrial craft had been visiting Earth for years and that governments had known about it. He said it again. He kept saying it, to audiences around the world, and he never walked any of it back. He became the most prominent former member of any Canadian federal government to make that kind of claim publicly on the record.
He had opened the world's first official UFO landing pad in 1967 and spent thirty-eight years apparently not thinking about it. Then he thought about it.
Whatever that implies about the ribbon-cutting ceremony, St. Paul has chosen not to make too much of it.
These days the site draws at least twenty tourists a day through the summer months. Tens of thousands have made the trip since 1967 — from across Alberta, from other provinces, from other countries. They walk around the pad. Some of them walk under it, into the international territory — open, shaded, comfortable to stand in — and cross an unmarked concrete threshold into a jurisdiction that belongs, technically, to nobody and everybody. They look at the stone map on the back. They read the sign about welcome and acceptance and neutral ground. Some of them call the hotline.
None of them, to the knowledge of any local authority, have arrived by spacecraft.
The time capsule is still buried. 2067 is a long way off, and whoever eventually cracks it open will find notes from people who, in 1967, genuinely expected the situation to have resolved itself by then.
Guinness World Records has certified the pad as the first official UFO landing pad ever built. This means St. Paul, Alberta, holds the world record for a structure that has never once been used for its stated purpose. The concrete is in excellent condition. The central pedestal is holding. The map of Canada has not moved.
The pad sits where it has always sat — corner of 50th Avenue and 53rd Street, under the big Alberta sky, 130,000 kilograms of concrete pointed at the universe, ready, earnest, and so far unsuccessful.
Nobody has landed yet.
The pad is ready when they are.