UFO Enthusiast Donates 30,000 Sighting-Related Documents to Canadian University

For most of human history, people have observed unusual phenomena in the sky. Unidentified flying objects are mysterious by nature, but thanks to a new collection at the University of Manitoba, they're now a lot easier to study. As Live Science reports, science writer and Canadian ufologist Chris Rutkowski has donated 30,000 documents related to UFO sightings to the school.

Rutkowski has been collecting reports of UFOs since 1975. In the past 40-plus years, he has published articles and 10 books on the subject of unidentified flying objects, with most of his research highlighting Canada's history of the strange happenings.

Many of the items he's donating focus on one case in particular: the Falcon Lake incident. On May 20, 1967, amateur geologist Stefan Michalak was looking for quartz near Falcon Lake in Manitoba when he spotted two glowing, cigar-shaped objects floating in the sky. One landed nearby, and when he approached the craft, he was scorched by hot gas that set his clothes on fire and left a grid of welts on his body. He was admitted to a hospital in Winnipeg to be treated for the burns and experienced headaches, blackouts, and diarrhea for weeks after the encounter. The Falcon Lake report is considered one of the best-documented UFO cases in Canadian history.

When the new collection becomes available as part of the University of Manitoba's archives, the public will be able to read documents related to that incident and others like it for the first time. The collection includes photos, research notes, reports, publications, and UFO zines Rutkowski has amassed over the years. Twenty thousand items are UFO reports filed over the past several decades, and 10,000 are UFO-related documents from the Canadian government.

To make the files accessible to even more people, the university is launching a crowdfunding campaign to support the digitization of the collection. You can donate to it here.

[h/t Live Science]