Fernand Belzil passed away on July 1 at the age of 88, but not without leaving a profound impact on the community of St. Paul.
Fern was born in St. Paul to parents Ernest and Maria, where he grew up on the family farm and attended the Belzil School down the road. Fern later attended College St. Jean in Edmonton, but his education was interrupted by the start of the Second World War.
In the late 1940s, Fern met his wife-to-be, Doris Desrosiers. The pair was married at the St. Paul Cathedral and had two children, Doug, who recently passed away, and Ron.
“Dad is blessed to have shared 52 years together with my mom before she passed away in 2003,” Ron Belzil said in his father’s eulogy. “They accomplished a great deal together as a team and served as fine examples for us to follow.”
Fern was very committed to his life in agriculture, and it showed in the form of numerous awards, including the 1975 San Francisco Supreme Stock Championship for best female, and the Farm Family Award, presented by the Government of Alberta in 1953 to the Ernest Belzil family, an award that still sits in Ron’s office today.
“All his life he was a very forward thinker. He was very successful in the cattle business,” said Ron. “He was very good to me. I was very fortunate to have a father like him who basically taught me everything and put me in the right direction.”
Ron said that his father had a number of other interests, including hockey, baseball and motorcycles, but it was Fern’s work as a cattle mutilations investigator that really consumed his free time in his later years.
“No matter where it was, he’d jump in his truck and go,” Ron said. “There’s no doubt that he did the most research for the cattle mutilation thing. He had discovered some interesting things from, well it’s hard to say evidence because there was a lack of evidence, but by process of elimination he was able to learn a lot about the phenomena.”
Fern became involved with the subject of cattle mutilation at the turn of the millennium. The St. Paul & District Chamber of Commerce, with whom Ron was involved at the time, purchased a display of UFO artifacts for the landing pad tourist information centre, and set up a free UFO hotline for anyone who wanted to report a sighting.
It was that UFO hotline that led Fern into his position as a respected cattle mutilations expert.
“The Chamber office called my office not knowing what to do because a rancher in Saskatchewan called to report a mutilated animal,” Ron said in his father’s eulogy, adding that he called his father to go check it out. “Dad was very impressed with what he observed. His curiosity drove his desire to find out whom or what was responsible for the death of the animals.”
It didn’t take long for Fern to gain a good deal of notoriety, and in the coming years he would be featured in a number of television documentaries and magazine articles, from sources including CBC’s the Fifth Estate, the Space Channel, the American National Geographic Society magazine, as well as numerous other newspapers and radio stations.
“He received numerous calls, emails from farmers, researchers, authors, curiosity seekers, publicity seekers, etc, from all over the world,” Ron said of his father. “The whole experience was troubling to him because no answer could be found for lack of evidence, besides the affected animal.”
Ron said that Fern would always end up with more questions than answers at the scene of a mutilation, but always did his research to help reach the best possible hypothesis.
“That was the problem, there was always a lack of evidence. It was the perfect crime every time, how often do you have a perfect crime every time? That tells you something,” Ron said, adding, the cases would often include missing pieces of skin that were never recovered or strange behavior in the animals, but Fern could not accept that there was no explanation.
“There was one that he visited where the animal was in the middle of a canola field. Well how could there be an animal in the middle of a field when there are no tracks getting there? Those are the indisputable pieces of information. That’s the kind of stuff he would read into. That’s what propelled him, because my dad was a very curious guy.”
Ron pointed out that it came as somewhat of a surprise to see his father embrace his role as a cattle mutilations investigator, as he had no predisposition to believing in extra terrestrial life.
“It doesn’t fit into people’s notions about how the world exists, and my dad was not predisposed to believing in anything extra terrestrial,” he said. “It was very difficult for him to even consider something like that, but made him think about it because he wasn’t seeing any other options.”
The Town of St. Paul went as far as to cover all of Fern’s mileage as a cattle mutilations expert, as he served as an ambassador to the town best known for its UFO landing pad.
“He did a lot for the town. The town used to pay his expenses for traveling around because he was good for business in the town,” Ron said, adding that his father never charged the farmers for his investigations.
“He had a soft spot for helping out the farmers, that was one of his big things.”
