In 1967, a farming town in northeast Alberta built the world’s first UFO landing pad, and Ottawa sent the Minister of National Defence to open it in person.
Centennial money built a lot of strange things
Canada’s centennial year produced a great deal of commemorative infrastructure across the country. Roadside outhouses. Oversized fish sculptures. Committees that outlived the projects they were struck to oversee. Most of it has since been quietly demolished or forgotten. St. Paul went a different direction entirely.
A hundred and thirty tonnes of concrete
The town poured 130 tonnes of concrete into a landing platform for interstellar visitors, built a map of Canada into the backstop using stone donated from every province, and posted a sign declaring the ground beneath it international territory, open to visitors from earth or otherwise. The Minister of National Defence cut the ribbon on June 3, 1967. St. Paul was named Centennial Capital of Canada that same afternoon. Guinness World Records has recognized it as the first official UFO landing pad in the world ever since.
Local businesses supplied the concrete and the steel. A local designer drew up the plans. The federal government’s entire contribution to the build was a man in a suit and a pair of scissors.
Still there, still doing its job
There is a time capsule sealed beneath the deck, scheduled to open in 2067. Nearly sixty years after the ribbon cutting, the pad is still standing, still free to visit, and still doing the one job it was actually built for, which is making people take the highway exit into St. Paul instead of driving past.
Centennial money went out to communities across the entire country that year, and a great deal of what it bought has since been torn down or paved over. The one project the neighbours largely paid for and built themselves is still on the map, still drawing visitors, and still exactly as strange as the day it opened.
What other pieces of Alberta’s overlooked, slightly odd history deserve as much attention as its politics gets?
