2 minute read
Matthew Hayes on The Granite Man of Gilmour
By Lin Parkin
In 1975, while watching "Bonanza" on TV with his wife in Maple Ridge, BC, carpenter and war veteran David Hamel experienced an extraterrestrial encounter in which aliens took him up into a spaceship, flew across the country to Gilmour, Ont., and told him he would return to that spot sometime in his life to help save mankind.
The short documentary, The Granite Man of Gilmour, by Candian educator and filmmaker Matthew Hayes (pictured right), tells the story of Hamel after that trip, as he spent 30 years attempting to build a flying saucer in his backyard.
Hamel’s story floated around Hayes’ radar for several decades before he pursued it as a documentary: “I first found out about Hamel when I was a teenager. My mom had a colleague who had a cottage near his home, so it was through the grapevine that I first heard about him.”
David Hamel
Years later, when Hayes was working on his Ph.D. on the history of Canada's UFO investigation from 1950-1995, Hamel’s story came to surface again and the idea of putting it into production started to take form. “He's really well known in some very obscure circles, you know, strange parts of the internet.” Even still, researching Hamel, who died in 2007 at age 83, was no easy task: “Trying to track people down to talk about the film, that was one of the hardest parts - just finding information about Hamel.”
The passion project nearly slipped through the cracks, until Hayes pitched the film to the Documentary Organization of Canada. “It went through the wringer and it’s a long process with a bunch of different people and parties involved.” But that’s when everything came together.
Hayes captures Hamel’s story in a way that doesn’t undermine his subject. “I'm glad that it came through as a respectful and compassionate approach, that’s what I was trying to achieve,” he says. “I don’t necessarily agree with all of the things that Hamel was saying, or frankly any of it, but there's just something that draws me to people who are so dedicated to something, and who persevere through all the odds, even when everyone's telling them to stop because it's nonsense, or that they've run out of money to do this.”
He adds: “It’s not so much the fact that this has to do with aliens and UFOs. The experience should just be, here is this story of a guy trying to make sense of the world in this place. I think that's something that we all struggle with throughout our lives.”
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