David Hamel

David Hamel (died 2012) was a French-Canadian inventor who spent roughly thirty years building a claimed magnetically driven flying saucer, the Hamel Flying Saucer (HFS). He lived in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, and later in Gilmour, Ontario, halfway between Toronto and Ottawa. The source archive dossier on his "Gravitomagnetic Drive" is the source for everything below.

Biography as reported

Hamel was born in Montreal, the firstborn of fifteen children. He joined the Canadian army in 1939 at age fifteen, saying it was the only work he could find during the Depression. He landed at Dieppe, survived a bullet to the spine, and was eventually captured and detained at Dresden in 1944. He describes surviving the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden by fleeing his prison through a window and rigging a hammock from a horse blanket and metal wire beneath a train headed for the Ukrainian drilling fields; after ten days he says he smelled gasoline, recognized a Nazi-held oil well zone, and signalled the Russians with a flare. He claims to have been awarded the Order of the White Eagle by the Russian military, and that the medal was stolen from his burnt hands in Belgium en route to Buckingham Palace. A photomontage of a subsequent audience with King George VI hung on his wall.

He received only an elementary-school education in 1930s Montreal. During the Cold War he operated radios along the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line in the Arctic and worked as a rock-cutter for a marble company that designed bank lobbies. He received a military disability pension beginning in the mid-1960s as compensation for wartime bullet wounds, after what the source describes as a twenty-year pension delay.

He married Nora Hamel, born 1944 with cerebral palsy, after several years of a courtship that began when he trained baton-twirling girls at the local Legion hall in Maple Ridge and she watched from her wheelchair. He had three children from an earlier marriage begun while on leave in Scotland. He supported Nora on his pension and cared for her at home, using a chain-link pulley system he rigged into the bedroom and bathroom ceilings to lift her from bed.

The 1975 abduction account

Hamel's central claim is that in 1975, while watching television with Nora in Maple Ridge, the screen went fuzzy and two beings emerged and took him aboard their craft. In Eric Shinn's retelling, they introduced themselves as "A" and Arkan from the planet Kladen, with an androgynous android companion named "On." Hamel described the experience as out-of-body ("They sent me through the roof!") and said the beings appeared as a humanoid male-female couple only because his brain constructed that visualization during telepathic contact.

The beings reportedly explained that their ship floated in an anti-gravity bubble powered by electrically charged vortical airflow between magnetic rings, and that the motor needed no fuel except inherent magnetic forces. Hamel was given a fifteen-minute demonstration ride at hypersonic speed and instructed to develop the technology on Earth to save humanity from "the Grid" and to build a survival ship like Noah's Ark. He also claimed the beings told him they had visited the ancient Egyptians before the Giza pyramids, appeared as three wise men at Bethlehem, and appeared to Third Reich scientists before World War II.

A second encounter three months later is said to have involved a black car with red diplomatic plates; the beings communicated for three hours with Nora rather than with David. Nora is separately said to have been visited in 1969 during recovery from surgery, with angelica leaves reportedly left on her hospital bed, in her hair and on the floor. The couple later reported finding matching angelica leaf patterns beneath wallpaper in their Gilmour home, and a yoke in the attic matching one carried by a man Hamel said he saw from the saucer.

The saucer project

Hamel began construction immediately after the claimed abduction and continued for about thirty years. He built and tested on his property in Gilmour, where the source reports he caused power outages in the vicinity of his testing, and where NASA reportedly visited after hearing of six forty-five-gallon oil drums he rocket-launched using motor prototypes. He is quoted: "I would work for NASA if they would listen to me, but they don't!" and "The scientists come here, but they can't accept the magnetic."

He claimed to have succeeded, but said the saucer flew off into the sky of its own accord and was never seen again. He also planned an "Ark of the Covenant," a Noah-inspired survival ship he hoped to launch from a giant slab of granite near James Bay, with blueprints lining his living room wall.

Hamel claimed that magnet-related patent applications had been misfiled years ago, specifically a process of magnetically aligning individual atoms within a lattice. He said he arrived at the Canadian Patent Office in Gatineau, Quebec, to find his entire file missing, slammed cross-shaped vibrating magnets on the counter, and had to be removed by police. No documentation of the application is provided in the source.

Reputation and community

Hamel was known locally as "the UFO guy." The source describes him as outspoken, independent and egomaniacal, but also practical and hands-on. He attracted devotees for whom a visit to his shed was simultaneously a spiritual pilgrimage, a conspiracy confirmation and an energy workshop. He was the subject of a 2019 documentary, The Granite Man of Gilmour, by Matthew Hayes, and of books including The Granite Man and the Butterfly by Jeanne Manning and Pierre Sinclaire, Granite Starship by Paul Coulbeck (which Hamel said copied his book), and a planned co-authored work with Bob Thomas.

Assessment

The dossier's own supporters report that as many as forty people attempted to build a forty-five-gallon oil drum device based on Hamel's design, all unsuccessfully, and that builder Tracy Jones recorded "no lift off" after 325 minutes of running a motor. No patent, no measurement and no recovered craft exist. See Hamel Claims vs. Evidence: The Gravitomagnetic Drive, Forty Failed Replications and the Absence of Measurement for the claim-by-claim assessment.

Further reading

• Welcome to the Future (2004): A Magazine Visit to David Hamel in Gilmour, Ontario, and What His Own Supporters Said About the Saucer Motor — the September 2004 magazine profile, written from a visit to Gilmour, in which much of the biography above first appeared.
• The Hamel 45 Gallon Drum on Rimstar: A Builder's Two Replication Attempts and the Admission That They Do Not Match Hamel's Design: a builder who visited Hamel with two drum replications in 1999–2000. It reprints Hamel's account of his exploding garage drum in Maple Ridge and passes on his statement that the cones should wobble, not spin.
• Stuff and Stories (2022): A Canadian Environmental Historian on David Hamel's Flying Saucer, Its Leftover Parts and Its Missing Evidence: a 2022 essay by Matthew Hayes, maker of the 2019 documentary. It places Hamel among the environmentally minded UFO contactees and describes the surviving prototype parts and blueprints, while reporting no test or measurement of them.
• The Granite Man and the Butterfly (1995): How Hamel's Authorized Biography Presents the 1977 Maple Ridge Liftoff, Its Side Effects and Its Press Trail: how the 1995 authorized biography presents the Maple Ridge prototypes, the claimed late-summer 1977 liftoff photographed on a Kodak Brownie, and the 1976–1977 local press items. Hamel is the only witness named.