Alien civilizations on distant planets still haven’t heard that there is prime parking for flying saucers in St. Paul. But now they can probably stop anywhere on Earth and get good directions.

The London-based BBC World Service has broadcast the UFO Landing Pad story to its 375 million listeners worldwide, with millions more to come via social media.

Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty is a journalist with the World Service program Witness History. She says her senior editor, having heard of the landing pad on a podcast, asked her to find out more.

Mutanda-Dougherty turned to Paul-Émile Boisvert, a St. Paul institution in his own right, to relate the history. 

Boisvert told her the tale of the 1967 Centennial project sponsored by a cement company, and how free-thinking local artist and teacher Margo Lagassé championed the “landing pad” concept.

“Paul was great and it’s such a sweet story as well,” Mutanda-Dougherty said. 

“Particularly all the elements where he kept bringing Margo back into the story. I just thought that was really lovely, and everyone’s been a bit tearful listening to that.”

Boisvert gave approximately an hour’s worth of background and detail in the interview, which ranged from 1967-era federal politics to local hockey rivalries. In that context, he spoke about the different cultures that make up the greater St. Paul community, and how that inspired Lagassé’s vision of welcoming the universe.

To Mutanda-Dougherty’s editor, the story was perfect for Witness History.

“We cover not just impactful moments in human history, but also the stranger things that people get up to, or things you wouldn’t expect. And she told me to have a little dig around,” Mutanda-Dougherty said.

So she dug around a little, and she loves the story.

“It ties in with the Centennial, so it’s actually about the broader issue of Canada. And it’s about people doing something about acceptance. It was perfect for us,” she said. “We  just had to find the right voice, and then of course Paul was a perfect choice.”

The piece was broadcast on BBC World Service, and is available online. The radio format requires the audio to be boiled down to a nine-minute segment—short enough to enjoy without interruption, long enough to tell a good story.

According to Mutanda-Dougherty, the format gives listeners exactly what they want to hear: small bits of human history that tell a much wider story while still getting the personal touches and the conversations that went on behind the scenes.

The BBC World Service social media posts, which have not been released yet, contain more photographs and video. Those are a minute and a half long, and reach another 36 million followers.

Mutanda-Dougherty said she was surprised to learn how diverse a small community like St. Paul can be.

“It ties nicely together with the message of everybody being welcome and everybody being accepted. Paul refers to the Filipino community that’s there, and he refers to the Ukrainian community as well,” she said. “That was surprising to me because it is geographically small.

“But such a wide variety of different lived experiences, and so perfectly highlighted by this message that was written in cement, in the end. That was something that I thought was really rather lovely.”

Stories like the landing pad history provide journalists and listeners a contrast to the often-brutal world of the news business. 

“It’s really nice to highlight stories where people are peacefully coexisting. They don’t get spoken about enough because riots in the UK are more interesting than talking about places where people are coexisting and getting along. But those are there if you search for them,” Mutanda-Dougherty said.

Such stories, she says, do good by encouraging people to do “crazy things.” 

“Because it literally will go down in history,” she said, “and encourage the Margos of the world.”

Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty. SUBMITTED
Paul on the pad: Paul-Émile Boisvert recounted the history of the UFO Landing Pad
for BBC World Service. MEL BROADBENT