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

The Granite Man and the Butterfly is the authorized biography of David Hamel. It was privately published in a limited run in 1995, written by journalist Jeanne Manning from Hamel's own account, with Pierre Sinclaire as co-author. The book itself is hard to find. The best public window onto it is a January 2013 post on the UFO Chronicles blog, by an unnamed author, which reproduces the book's jacket copy and author notes and describes a handful of its photographs in captions. That post is promotional. It ends by urging readers to buy one of the few remaining copies, praises the book as uniquely prized among UFO readers, and says many people know Hamel as "the Billy Meier of Canada". It is useful here because it shows how Hamel's camp told the story of the first claimed flight. It is not evidence that the flight happened.

What the book is said to cover

The jacket copy presents Hamel as an ordinary man chosen for a heroic task. In this telling he was handed advanced information for building a spacecraft that would also supply abundant, non-polluting energy, and was then blocked by sceptics and government officials. According to the blurbs, the book covers his wartime experiences, the events that led to what it calls his close encounter of the third kind, the operating principles of his machines, and an alleged official cover-up. An appendix deals with the Canadian engineer Wilbert Smith, whom the post credits as an early researcher, working with the government, into unusual behaviour of magnetic fields. The post says the book ended up with a private publisher after mainstream houses declined it.

The post is inconsistent about the author's name. It gives "Jean Manning" in one place and "Jeanne Manning" in the author biography. That biography describes her as a freelance journalist who had covered new-energy technologies across North America and Europe since 1981, held a sociology degree from the University of Idaho, sat on the boards of two new-energy organizations, and lived in Vancouver. Sinclaire is described as an electronic technician with ten years' experience and an interest in alternative energy. His listed projects include a nuclear decay battery for small appliances, a hydrogen cell for cleaner combustion, a transformerless computer power supply, and work connected to a device called the ML Converter, attributed to the Mathernita religious community in Switzerland. The notes say he had spent six years working with Hamel to duplicate the device that lifted off in 1977. Both are presented as supporters of the project.

The prototypes as captioned

The captions describe a sequence of Maple Ridge, British Columbia prototypes built before Hamel moved to Ontario:

• The four-pod-stand machine. According to the post, this was the second working prototype. It sat on a four-pod stand in front of Hamel's house, and the caption says it kept itself in motion by magnetism rather than by a falling ball. The caption gives it as 8 feet in diameter and 500 pounds. It says the machine was photographed only when it was finished and when it took off, because Hamel kept the interior hidden to protect a patent he meant to apply for.
• An intermediate plywood-disc machine. Built between the four-pod prototype and the last one, it is said to have taught Hamel how to balance a large plywood disc with magnets.
• A final cement prototype. It was built in Maple Ridge before Hamel left for Ontario. The post gives no details.

The post also mentions one of Hamel's early main drawings, which shows the device's internal parts. It reproduces no dimensions or magnet specifications from the drawing. For the later design vocabulary of cones, granite balls and rejection magnets, see Hamel Flying Saucer (HFS).

The claimed liftoff

The central claim is that the four-pod prototype rose from its stand at about 11:00 p.m. one evening near the end of summer 1977. The departure is shown in a series of five pictures, labelled Figures A to E, and the captions imply that Hamel took them himself on a black-and-white Kodak Brownie, needing 6 to 10 seconds to reset the camera between shots. The captions draw attention to a glow around the object, its angle of climb, and a shift in colour as it rose. Hamel is reported as saying that the lights in and around the house went out and that the craft made no sound. In the post's account, what troubled him was losing the machine and all its magnets, which he never saw again, not the strange effects.

One caption attributes further effects to the plywood-disc machine: double exposures on camera film, television interference, and cars stalling in the street outside the house for no apparent reason. Another image is captioned as a negative found embedded in Hamel's palm after his supposed return to Earth. The post gives no explanation of that.

The press trail

According to the post, the book shows Hamel with newspaper articles from 1975 to 1980 about his encounter and the prototypes. The post's captions name two items. One is credited to Glen Kask in The Gazette of Maple Ridge, B.C., on March 31, 1976, describing a device meant to heat homes, power industry and fly aircraft. The other is credited to Ron Thody of The Express newspaper of Maple Ridge, writing on October 11, 1977. The caption attributes to Thody's article the statement that Hamel said anyone could have the secret, build the machine and produce their own energy; this is the caption's paraphrase, not a verified quotation of Hamel. The same caption adds that oil cartels and multinationals would hardly welcome this, but it is not clear whether that comment is Hamel's or Thody's. A third quotation comes from Sinclaire on CBC Television in 1991: "David Hamel has proven with his three prototypes, the theory of electro-gravitational energy."

These are captions, not reproductions of the articles. They cite a March 1976 article and an October 1977 article, and the post does not say whether the 1977 article mentions the claimed flight. Sinclaire's "proven" is the co-author's judgement, not a test result.

What the material does and does not establish

The post records the claims in the form Hamel's own circle published them: the date and hour of the liftoff, the camera and the number of frames, the size and weight of the machine, and the reported electrical and automotive effects. It does not establish any of them. The only witness named is Hamel. The photographs are described but not analysed, and nothing in the post says whether anyone else ever examined the negatives. The interior of the machine that flew was never photographed, by Hamel's own choice. The camera, lighting and car effects are reported, not measured. The craft and its magnets were, by the story's own terms, never recovered. These gaps match the wider record in Hamel Claims vs. Evidence: The Gravitomagnetic Drive, Forty Failed Replications and the Absence of Measurement. The founding flight rests on testimony. Replication attempts covered elsewhere in this dossier, such as the drum builds in The Hamel 45 Gallon Drum on Rimstar: A Builder's Two Replication Attempts and the Admission That They Do Not Match Hamel's Design, report no demonstrated lift, and that builder had not yet put Hamel's design corrections into practice, so the drums were not faithful copies. Hamel Claims vs. Evidence: The Gravitomagnetic Drive, Forty Failed Replications and the Absence of Measurement records Dan LaRochelle's account of as many as forty unsuccessful drum builds, and Tracy Jones's report of "no lift off" after 325 minutes of running.

The post also adds detail to the timeline in Welcome to the Future (2004): A Magazine Visit to David Hamel in Gilmour, Ontario, and What His Own Supporters Said About the Saucer Motor. That profile dates the encounter to 1975 and the family's move from British Columbia to Ontario to 1980. The post's captions, with their 1975 to 1980 press window, a claimed 1977 flight and Maple Ridge prototypes built before the move to Ontario, are consistent with those dates.