Canadian Minister's Love Of UFO's
In the spring of 1966, in the midst of one of his government's biggest
crises, prime minister Lester Pearson turned his attention to flying
saucers.
Cabinet documents from the time reveal the embattled prime minister was
intrigued by repeated reports of unidentified flying objects in the night
skies over southern Ontario, Michigan and other Great Lakes states.
The UFO sighting craze reached new heights when heavyweight boxer George
Chuvalo, fresh from his famous "Battle of Toronto" match against Muhammad
Ali, told reporters he and his wife saw unexplainable objects over Toronto
the night after his March 29, 1966 loss to the world heavyweight boxing
champion, then known as Cassius Clay.
At the time, Pearson and his government were licking their own wounds. For
the preceding month, the Liberals and John Diefenbaker's Conservative
opposition had been trading heavy blows in the Commons over the
government's handling of the case of George Victor Spencer, a Vancouver
postal clerk accused by the RCMP, but never charged, of being a low-level
Soviet spy.
Under relentless questioning in the House by Diefenbaker and other
critics, flustered Liberal justice minister Lucien Cardin lashed out by
revealing the previously secret case of Gerda Munsinger, a German
prostitute who had an affair with associate defence minister Pierre
Sevigny during an earlier Diefenbaker government.
The parliamentary rancour that followed nearly brought the Liberal
government to collapse and is considered by some historians to be one of
the most noxious periods in modern Canadian parliamentary history.
Pearson told his cabinet it was "imperative" for the Liberals to end
debate on the Munsinger issue, which threatened "to exacerbate an already
dangerous and destructive Parliamentary situation."
He soon agreed to a royal commission into Canada's first Parliamentary sex
scandal and a separate commission of inquiry into the handling of the
Spencer case. Mr. Pearson also suggested a new debate on the death
penalty, a hot subject as two Quebec separatists were on death row.
Cardin, who had been vehemently opposed to a Spencer inquiry, threatened
to quit, taking with him other Quebec members of the Liberal caucus. There
was media speculation that Pearson, too, would resign.
On the morning of April 5, 1966, with the espionage inquiries soon set to
begin, Pearson met with his cabinet. But instead of discussing Spencer or
Munsinger, he said he wanted ministerial briefings on the UFO phenomenon,
according to newly uncovered cabinet meeting minutes at the National
Archives.
Paul Hellyer was minister of national defence at the time. In an interview
yesterday, he did not recall Pearson's UFO directive.
"It's quite possible that we provided him with a briefing or gave him the
information that we had, which was not very extensive," he said. "If he
followed up, that's what would have happened. But he sometimes raised
things, then didn't bother following up. There were a lot of things
cooking in those days."
Indeed. That very night, the Commons defeated a government motion to
abolish capital punishment. The following day, Pearson unveiled a plan to
make the federal public service bilingual.