How Canada’s Military Has Handled UFOs and UAP

The first organised Canadian efforts date from the early 1950s, during the wave of flying saucer reports that followed the 1947 American sightings. Project Magnet was a Department of Transport effort led by radio engineer Wilbert B. Smith from about 1950 to 1954. It was not a military project, but it ran alongside one.

Project Second Storey was a committee set up under the Defence Research Board in 1952 to consider how sightings should be collected and assessed. It met for a relatively short time, drew up a reporting approach, and concluded that the reports it saw did not justify a major investigation. Both efforts had ended by the mid-1950s. Our entry on Project Magnet covers them in more detail.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, sightings reported to the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Department of National Defence were recorded, and procedures existed for pilots and air defence personnel to report unidentified objects. These reports were collected mainly as a possible air defence concern, in the context of the Cold War and the joint North American air defence arrangement that became NORAD in 1958.

In practice the military investigated very few cases in depth. The files that survive show a pattern of logging, occasional follow-up where a report involved physical effects or public attention, and little scientific analysis.

Two 1967 cases stand out because the RCMP and the military did respond. On 20 May 1967, Stefan Michalak, a prospector near Falcon Lake in Manitoba, reported that a landed craft had burned him when he touched it. He was treated for burns, and the RCMP and RCAF investigated the site. No conclusion identifying a craft was reached, and the case remains disputed.

On 4 October 1967, witnesses at Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, reported lights descending into the sea. The RCMP, the Coast Guard and navy divers searched and found nothing, and the records describe an unidentified object. Both cases are documented in files now held by Library and Archives Canada.

By the end of the 1960s DND no longer wanted responsibility for UFO reports. The job of receiving them was transferred to the National Research Council, which kept them largely as a clearinghouse, in part because of its interest in meteors and fireballs. The NRC did not investigate UFOs as such, and it eventually stopped collecting the reports in the 1990s.

From then on there was no federal office dedicated to the subject. Pilots continued to report unusual sightings through aviation incident channels, and some of those reports appear in Transport Canada’s civil aviation occurrence database, but nobody was tasked with explaining them.

On 11 February 2023, a week after a Chinese high-altitude balloon was shot down off the United States coast, NORAD tracked an unidentified object over Yukon. With the agreement of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden, a United States Air Force F-22 shot it down over Canadian territory, with Canadian aircraft taking part in the operation. Officials described it as a small cylindrical object.

The RCMP and the Canadian military searched for the debris in difficult winter terrain. Public statements at the time did not identify the object, and no recovery or identification was announced in the weeks that followed. American officials later said that the objects shot down in that period were probably benign, such as commercial or research balloons, although this has not been confirmed for the Yukon object specifically.

In 2023 the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada launched the Sky Canada Project, a study of how reports of unidentified aerial phenomena are handled in Canada. Its focus was on the process rather than on proving or disproving any particular explanation: how the public and pilots report sightings, which agencies receive them, and whether a clearer, science-based system is needed.

The project marked the first time in decades that a federal body had looked at the subject in an organised way. Readers should consult the Chief Science Advisor’s own publications for its findings and recommendations, rather than second-hand summaries.