"Stuff & Stories: A Flying Saucer" is a short essay by Matthew Hayes, published on July 25, 2022 by the Canadian environmental-history site NiCHE. It was the fourth entry in a series run with Histoire Source | Source Story on the material side of environmental history. Hayes made a 15-minute documentary about David Hamel in 2019, and the essay reflects on that work. It is not a technical report and does not try to test the saucer. Its question is a historian's one: was Hamel a visionary or a crank?
For this dossier the essay matters mainly as a cultural reading of Hamel by someone who first knew of him through family stories and later filmed what was left of his project.
What the essay says Hamel claimed
The central claim, as Hayes reports it, is one Hamel held to the end: that he had succeeded in building a flying saucer, and that the craft then left of its own accord. Hamel died in 2012. The essay gives no way to check the claim, and neither do the Hamel Flying Saucer and David Hamel pages or the claims-versus-evidence comparison, which record the same flew-off-by-itself story.
Behind that claim sits a purpose. According to the essay, Hamel believed the beings he met had handed him special knowledge that would let him obtain clean energy and save the world from its environmental crises. The saucer, in this telling, was only a first step.
The origin story Hayes recounts matches the one told elsewhere in the dossier. In 1975, while Hamel was living in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, and watching Bonanza at home with his wife Nora, the television picture is said to have gone fuzzy before extraterrestrials appeared and carried him off to see their distant planet. The essay says this set him on a building project that would occupy the next 30 years.
Hayes also passes on the local reputation that reached the family, at several removes, through the author's mother. Living in Gilmour, Ontario, halfway between Toronto and Ottawa, Hamel was remembered as reclusive and eccentric, hard to understand because of a thick French Canadian accent, and as someone around whom strange things happened. One part of that reputation was that his big workshop sometimes caused electrical blackouts. The essay repeats this as hearsay and cites no outage record.
What physical material the essay mentions
Hayes lists a few items that appear in the 2019 film: pieces of an early saucer build, some coloured design drawings, and a jelly-like cone the essay calls mysterious. They are shown in the film, not described in the essay; it says nothing about what they are made of, how they were meant to work, or whether they are what they are said to be. A photograph credited to Shelby Lisk shows two of the film's subjects, identified only as Ray and Barry, looking over a piece of the saucer with the author.
The essay also mentions archival footage from the early 2000s, found online, in which Hamel re-enacts his encounter. Despite a long search, Hayes could not reach whoever made it.
Why, in the essay's view, such stories appear
Hayes declines to rule on the saucer and instead tries to "sit on the fence and look around," treating the line between visionary and crank as a subject in itself. The essay places Hamel among UFO contactees who, from the 1950s onward, preached nuclear disarmament and world peace, and argues that the hoped-for rescue shifted with each era's worries: Cold War nuclear destruction in the early 1950s, then the energy crisis and a growing environmental movement by 1975, when Hamel started building.
Much of the UFO world, in this reading, is made of things that cannot be held: the special knowledge passed to contactees, and the electromagnetism, gravity and anti-gravity that the UFO community has long favoured as the force moving saucers. That is the ground covered by the gravitomagnetic drive claim. Hayes links scientists' long habit of ignoring and mocking UFOs to this lack of material: "there's no stuff to study." Radiation is singled out as an exception in UFO lore, because although it is invisible, scientists can measure it.
The essay ends on a cultural point rather than a technical one. In Hayes's account, stories like Hamel's show people turning to imagined visitors when a fear seems beyond beating or a hope beyond reach, and environmental problems fit that pattern because they feel too large for humans to solve alone.
How it fits the dossier
The essay adds a reflective, historian's account to the profiles and supporter material collected in the archived Hamel dossier and the 2004 Maisonneuve profile. What it documents is limited: that Hayes made a 2019 film about Hamel, that some saucer parts, drawings and a cone-shaped object were shown in it, and that Hamel claimed until his death to have succeeded and that the saucer flew off on its own.
It establishes nothing about whether the device worked. It reports no test, flight, hover or power output, and it does not document the blackouts. On the physical question it leaves the dossier where it was: parts, plans and testimony, with no measurement. The claims-versus-evidence comparison sets this against the failed replication reports.
Reference
Matthew Hayes, "Stuff & Stories: A Flying Saucer," NiCHE Canada, July 25, 2022. https://niche-canada.org/2022/07/25/stuff-stories-a-flying-saucer/
Source notes & attribution
- https://niche-canada.org/2022/07/25/stuff-stories-a-flying-saucer/