Ottawa

Carp and the Guardian Letters

Between 1989 and 1991 Canadian journalists and researchers received anonymous letters signed "Guardian", claiming that an alien craft had crashed near the village of Carp outside Ottawa and that the government was running a secret programme. Maps and documents came with them, and later a videotape of a glowing object filmed at night. The researcher Bob Oechsler and others checked everything checkable: the documents proved to be assembled from genuine letterheads, and the video showed a lit object in a field. In the 1990s the authorship was attributed to a local man; there was never a full confession. The story survives as a model of how a well-assembled hoax lives for years.