Close UFO Encounter: The Case of Stephen Michalak

On May 20, 1967, fifty-one-year-old Stephen Michalak was on vacation with his wife and children and he was searching for minerals along Falcon Lake, 80 miles east of Winnipeg, Manitoba, when a UFO appeared from the sky. Looking up he saw two glowing oval-shaped objects. One abruptly stopped its downward flight while the other continued, landing on a flat rock outcropping 160 feet away.

Michalak carefully approached the strange craft, which looked like a bowl with a dome on top, forty feet wide and 15 feet high.

He claims that he saw a grid-like exhaust vent on the side of it, which shot out a large amount of gas that set his clothes on fire. Mysterious burns also appeared on his body.

The UFO then went up into the sky and flew away. Stephen went to the hospital complaining of pain and sickness due to the encounter.

When doctors examined Michalak in a Winnipeg hospital a few hours later, they noted a dramatic burn pattern all across his chest-exactly like the grid Michalak had described on the UFO's underside.

Michalak's health problems continued and brought him to Minnesota's Mayo Clinic the next year.

A few weeks after the encounter, he took RCMP to the location of the landing site and a semicircle from it was still there.

To this day, no one has been able to explain what happened to him or what the UFO was.

Stephen died in 1999, but the burns remained on his body. Currently, the Canadian Government identifies the case as "unsolved".