While the s more seriously, Canadians who spot something strange in the sky are still using a Cold War-era reporting procedure to report over 500 sightings in the last 20 years.

Using Canada’s information freedom laws, Vice News obtained an almost 300-page report detailing hundreds of sightings as reported using the Communication Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings, or CIRVIS. CIRVIS reports are commonly submitted by police, military and those working in aviation. Indeed, nearly two dozen of the sights come from the Canadian military. The reports make for fascinating reading:

Other unusual observations include Newfoundland police “tracking two brightly coloured flying objects” in August 2001 and a December 2018 passenger flight from Alaska to Seattle that reported “pulsating lights” descending from 60,000 feet.

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There are loads of civilian sightings too, such as a large glowing “object seen hovering quite quickly back and forth just above the tree line” near Peterborough, Ontario, in January 2011.

One uncommonly long report even details a sighting that was confirmed by military radar. On the night of Dec. 23, 2018, a fisherman in the Bay of Fundy and a woman at home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, both contacted a search and rescue centre to report a light that “was yellow, steady, and hovering” high above the Atlantic Ocean. When Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) personnel reviewed radar data from NORAD, the joint Canada-U.S. air defence alliance, they “observed three primary radar hits” that correlated almost exactly to the time and location of the sighting.

Vice made all 290 pages of the report available in a .pdf on their story which you should definitely .

Canada mostly relied on private UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski to gather the country’s UFO sighting into his annual , but the renewed public interest seems to have caused Canadian feds to cut off the flow of information to Rutkowski last year.

“I have noticed an abrupt halt to my receiving of UFO reports through the Department of National Defence and Transport Canada,” Rutkowski told VICE World News. “UFOs may now be getting more attention from the government, which is ostensibly a good thing, but as a consequence the subject will be much less open to public scrutiny.”

Here in the States, several steps by the federal government towards greater transparency and disclosure of UFO documents have thrilled researchers but left the important questions unanswered, mainly just what the hell is going on in our skies. In 2021, a group of to discuss near their near daily sightings of UFOs after the government acknowledged 144 reports from service members. The 2022 U.S. defense budget provides for a special office to handle UFO reports, so maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some of the answers we seek.