According to the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System, report No. 2021A0440, the two aircraft called in “a bright green flying object.”
“It flew into a cloud, then disappeared,” said the single-page document. “No impact to operations.
“CFC4003 was at F300 [30,000 feet] and thought it was flying; while KLM618 was at F400 and thought it was space debris. There was no indication of the direction of movement, speed or any identifying marks.”
The frustratingly sketchy report was filed away in the federal government’s flight incident archive, where it now sits along with dozens of other UFO reports from airlines such as Air Canada, Porter and WestJet.
UFOs—or, in military parlance, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs)—have long captured imaginations: Are the reports genuine? What are they? Should we be concerned?
Yes, the majority of reported UFOs are genuine, not pranks. Most can also be explained or identified. But consistently, a fraction cannot, and that has become a matter of escalating concern.
VICE World News recently published a series of stories after conducting extensive investigations that uncovered nearly 70 years of UFO cases involving the Canadian Armed Forces along with another collection of two decades-worth of incident reports —some 500 of them in 300 pages of sightings from commercial pilots, soldiers and police officers.
The military reports include accounts of radar tracking a “large tubular object” in 2002, a “white spot, turning blue and red” seen “travelling in zigzag formation” above Ontario’s Canadian Forces Base Borden in 1978, and “an orange pulsating symmetrical light” witnessed silently speeding over Ottawa by two air force officers in March 1950.
Pundits and armchair experts have typically dismissed such incidents as new human technology, weather balloons, a meteorological phenomenon or unusual light.
“What’s most striking is that this is not a new phenomenon,” Timothy Sayle, a national security, foreign intelligence and declassified records expert at the University of Toronto, told VICE.
“The fact that reports were filed in the early 1950s suggests these are not recent, commercially available drones.”
Even in 1953, sightings were so prevalent among air force pilots that the Canadian military standardized UFO reporting.
“Which makes sense, because military institutions should be searching for threats and trying to identify them,” said Sayle. “That doesn’t mean they’re looking for aliens, but these are highly credible observers whose professional judgement is at stake.”
Even the head of NASA, Bill Nelson, has suggested it’s impossible to rule out they are the technologies of extraterrestrial life.
The issue was thrust into the fore with recent developments in the United States, where a 2021 Pentagon task force report and the highly publicized release of other military files, such as naval aviators’ previously classified video and audio of physics-defying phenomena, caused a sensation.
In August, a U.S. Congressional report—an addendum to an act governing American clandestine services—warned that “cross-domain transmedium threats to the United States national security are expanding exponentially.”
A “cross-domain transmedium” threat is, by the Pentagon’s definition, an object that can move from water to air to space in ways that aren’t understood. Last year, a leaked video authenticated by the Pentagon appeared to show a UFO seamlessly flying from the sky into the ocean.
Even more startling to many, however, was Congress’s desire to distinguish between UFOs that are human in origin and those that are not.
“Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis,” it said, “will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena.”
It was a stunning acknowledgement. A first. Except for the notable exception of the late Paul Hellyer, an engineer and former Canadian MP who spoke long and loud about UFOs, aliens and their potential to solve world problems, politicians have generally stopped short of linking UFOs with intelligent life beyond Earth. Typically, they say that those that can’t be written off as some natural phenomena are likely highly advanced, human-made vehicles.
Even the head of NASA, Bill Nelson, has suggested it’s impossible to rule out they are the technologies of extraterrestrial life.
Last year, Nelson said there had been more than 300 acknowledged sightings of unidentified flying objects of unknown origins since 2004.
“I’ve talked to those pilots and they know they saw something, and their radars locked on to it. And they don’t know what is. And we don’t know what it is,” he told the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics in a live-streamed interview.
“We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology,” continued Nelson. “But it’s something. And so this is a mission that we’re constantly looking, ‘Who is out there? Who are we? How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize?’ And ‘are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns and billions of other galaxies?’ It’s so large I can’t conceive it.
“Now there are even theories that there might be other universes,” he added. “And if that’s the case, who am I to say planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?
Overseas, Ukrainian astronomers are now saying they’re witnessing an inordinate number of UFOs in the skies over their war-ravaged country.
In June 2022, Canadian government officials agreed to share information about UFOs with their American counterparts.
“Given the shared priority for nuclear safety and security of nuclear facilities, and the growing interest in UAPs in both Canada and the United States, the [Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission] is committed to raising the issue with its United States counterpart and sharing any related information going forward,” the deputy minister of natural resources, John Hannaford, said in a letter dated June 6.
“We have reached out to counterparts in the United States Department of Energy regarding the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Preliminary Report on UAPs to learn more about its perspective in order to help inform analysis and action in Canada.”
In July, the Pentagon announced it was opening the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate unexplained aerial threats. The AARO aims to reclassify unidentified aerial phenomena as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena and rename the Pentagon’s office in line with the new designation.
Overseas, Ukrainian astronomers are now saying they’re witnessing an inordinate number of UFOs in the skies over their war-ravaged country.
Earlier this month, Kyiv’s Main Astronomical Observatory and the country’s National Academy of Science published a paper on the subject.
“We see them everywhere,” said the paper Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events. “We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear.”
The sightings were made at the science academy’s Main Astronomical Observatory in Kyiv and a village south of the capital, Vinarivka. The paper’s authors said the observatories began hunting for UFOs as an independent project because of the enthusiasm around the subject.
The scientists divided the phenomena into two categories: cosmics and phantoms.
“We note that Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. We call these ships names of birds (swift, falcon, eagle).” While “Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 per cent.”
Phantoms have a “completely black body that does not emit and absorbs all the radiation falling on it.”
The researchers say the UFOs are so fast that they’re hard to photograph.
“The eye does not fix phenomena lasting less than one-tenth of a second. It takes four-tenths of a second to recognize an event. Ordinary photo and video recordings will also not capture the [unidentified aerial phenomenon].
“To detect UAP, you need to fine-tune the equipment: shutter speed, frame rate, and dynamic range.”
So researchers did just that. “We have developed a special observation technique, taking into account the high speeds of the observed objects,” they wrote. “The exposure time was chosen so that the image of the object did not shift significantly during exposure. The frame rate was chosen to take into account the speed of the object and the field of view of the camera. In practice, the exposure time was less than 1 ms, and the frame rate was no less than 50 Hz.”
Positioning the cameras at meteor monitoring stations roughly 120 kilometres apart, the scientists made repeated observations of strange objects in the sky. They didn’t speculate on what the objects were, noting only the observations and mentioning the objects’ incredible speeds.
“Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to 15 degrees per second,” the researchers said. “Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10-12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s.”
Speeds that high are out of this world. 15 km/s is equivalent to 54,000 km/h. The fastest jet aircraft in the world is the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, with a speed of 3,500 km/h, four times faster than the cruising speed of a commercial jetliner.
The scientists maintain it’s unclear what the objects’ origins are, despite the continuing war in Ukraine and associated missiles, rockets and other airborne weaponry—along with widespread speculation that China and Russia may be fielding new technologies.
The former officer described a white “orb of light” in a dark, starless sky that appeared to be large and solid.
The Canadian files come from a broad spectrum of witnesses, including at least two dozen involving the military. Some cases were explained, some not.
On Sept. 14, 2007, a patrolling military police officer at CFB North Bay in northeastern Ontario “observed an intense light over the base” well before sunrise.
According to an incident report obtained by VICE, he called an officer with 21 Squadron, the same unit that is notified when civilian pilots spot UFOs in Canadian airspace.
Other witnesses poured outside. One officer “declined to classify the occurrence.” Another “could not explain it either.” A different military policeman said “the light appeared to move very slowly upwards” with “no sound” until it “faded with the rising sun” more than an hour after it was first noticed.
The report noted the “phenomenon has been recorded by video and digital camera.”
“I was teased and given a hard time for reporting it,” explained the author of the unclassified report, who spoke to the news outlet on condition of anonymity.
“Military culture can be unforgiving.”
The former officer described a white “orb of light” in a dark, starless sky that appeared to be large and solid. “It was bright and as it slowly ascended, it began to change to a grey-black colour before it disappeared. I have no idea what the object was.”
He said it was captured on both the base security camera system and a cellphone, and that all the video was “logged into evidence as per protocol.”
VICE World News tried to obtain those recordings via an access to information request, but was told by the Defence Department that “following a thorough and complete search … no records could be located.”
The report’s author said about 15 “curious” military personnel saw the object, including 21 Squadron staff and U.S. Air Force members stationed at the base as part of Norad. He claimed the case was investigated by Norad in Colorado, which “concluded that it was a ‘celestial event.’” They didn’t ever interview the eyewitness.
The cases are documented in so-called CIRVIS reports maintained by Transport Canada. Short for “Communication Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings,” CIRVIS is a Cold War-era threat-reporting procedure that is evidently still used by Canadian air traffic controllers and the Royal Canadian Air Force to document credible UFO cases.
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