Records Reveal Canada Ran a Secret Military Operation to Recover the February 2023 UFOs

Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below.

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When unidentified objects drifted over North American airspace in February 2023 and were shot down by NORAD fighter jets, the Royal Canadian Air Force quietly stood up a formal military operation to find and recover whatever had come down. Records released by the Department of National Defence under the Access to Information Act show the operation had a name — Operation UNKNOWN AERIAL PHENOMENON 23, or OP UAP23 — its own classified order, and aircraft and crews tasked from four air force wings across the country.

The records were released in response to request A-2023-00696, which asked the Department of National Defence for records of unexplained phenomena — aerial or other — including UAPs, UFOs, and any interactions or involvement with the military or other Government of Canada departments, covering the period from 1940 to July 2023. The 84-page release pairs the OP UAP23 paperwork with something rarer: a years-long internal log of UFO sighting reports phoned and emailed in by airline pilots, air traffic controllers, and members of the public.

A Named Operation, Built on Short Notice

The centrepiece of the release is the operational order for OP UAP23, issued by 1 Canadian Air Division and the Canadian NORAD Region's Joint Force Air Component Commander out of Winnipeg, dated 12 February 2023. The order itself carries a classification of CAN SECRET, and large portions of it are blacked out in the release, but the surviving structure tells the story. The operation was a "Search and Recovery Plan," organised into four phases — preparation, deployment, employment, and redeployment — with a tactical air task force pulled together to comb a search area after the February shootdowns.

A separate warning order from 12 Operational Support Squadron in Halifax captures just how fast this came together. The squadron notes plainly that the operation was "very short notice and no warning order was originally published," and that 12 Wing was directed to force-generate a CH148 Cyclone helicopter to take part. In military terms, a warning order is supposed to come first; here the preparations were already under way before the paperwork could catch up.

The order tasked aircraft from across the RCAF: 8 Wing Trenton was to provide a CC177 Globemaster and deploy CC130H Hercules and CC138 Twin Otter aircraft; 12 Wing Shearwater would deploy the CH148; and 19 Wing Comox would deploy a CH149 Cormorant. The named leadership included an Air Task Force Commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Thompson, and a Search Master, Captain Helen Nielson out of Victoria. This is the same broad institution The Canada Report covered when we looked at how the RCAF is overhauling its aging fleets through a decade-long transformation — the Twin Otters and Hercules pressed into this recovery role are exactly the kind of older airframes at the centre of that modernisation push.

What the Briefing Slides Reveal — and What They Don't

Alongside the operational order, the release includes briefing material prepared for the Joint Force Air Component Commander under the heading "Unmanned Aerial Phenomenon." One slide, with an information cut-off date of 13 February 2023, sets the scene by noting that on 4 February 2023 a high-altitude balloon was shot down off the coast of North Carolina — the opening event in the sequence of February 2023 shootdowns that put NORAD on high alert across the continent.

Another slide describes one of the objects in unusually specific terms: a small, cylindrical object, silver or metallic in appearance, roughly four to five feet in width and depth, that appeared to have four arms sticking out of its sides. The briefing records that the object moved very little and tracked slowly north-northwest. The image panels that would have shown it are redacted, and several of the slides carry the marking SECRET//REL TO CAN.

What is striking is how much of the analysis points toward the mundane. The same briefing package walks through how often balloons drift above 30,000 feet, noting that the U.S. National Weather Service launches weather balloons twice a day, that NASA runs large research balloon flights ten to fifteen times a year, and that commercial partners launch roughly a hundred a year. One slide identifies a specific candidate: a possible weather balloon launched from the KAPX Doppler radar station, where 31 balloons went up in February at two per day, a launch pattern the document says "corresponds with" the description in the military situation report. Another raises the possibility of a hobbyist "pico balloon" flown by an Illinois balloon-launching group, cross-referenced against amateur tracking data. In other words, the air force's own working theory for at least one object leaned toward something far more ordinary than the spectacle suggested at the time.

The release is also notable for what it withholds. Pages 67 through 69 and 86 through 87 are held back entirely under sections 13(1)(b) and 15(1) of the Access to Information Act — exemptions covering information received in confidence from other governments and information that could injure national defence or international affairs. The most operationally sensitive parts of OP UAP23 — exact staging locations, search coordinates, command-and-control details — remain blacked out. The documents confirm the operation happened and name who ran it, but the question of what, if anything, was recovered is not answered in the released pages.

A Decade of Pilot and Public UFO Reports

The second half of the release is, in many ways, the more human document. It contains the air force's running CIRVIS logs — short for Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings — along with a stack of emails and intake forms recording UFO reports passed up the chain between roughly 2013 and 2023. Most of these came from airline pilots and air traffic controllers, and a striking number came from ordinary Canadians who simply called a military base to report something odd in the sky.

The log reads like a cross-section of the country. In October 2020, a caller from St. Walburg, Saskatchewan reported seeing thousands of diamond-shaped objects pass overhead at high speed in the dawn hours, moving west to east, silent, with smaller objects trailing behind — and claimed to have cell-phone photos of the event. In June 2022, a Master Corporal at 4 Wing Cold Lake relayed a report of three illuminated orbs flying in a straight line and then manoeuvring rapidly, immediately after an intense storm. Over Comox and Vancouver Island, the duty watch office at 19 Wing fielded a steady trickle of reports across the years: two orange glowing objects flying silently over streets in 2013, recurring orange and white lights near Quadra Island in 2015, and a low, fast object with red and white lights in 2018.

Commercial aviation features heavily. The CIRVIS logs catalogue pilots from Swoop, Cargojet, Lufthansa, Emirates, Delta, United, and Air Canada reporting bright lights, flashing objects, and unexplained formations at cruising altitude over the Atlantic and across the North. In one February 2023 entry, an Ottawa control tower controller described watching a "stationary star" east of the airport that, through binoculars, was blinking between green, white and red and appeared to jitter before slowly moving — observed by other ground personnel as well, and reported up to the Canadian Air Defence Sector.

The Air Force Says It's 'Out of the UFO Business'

Threaded through the emails is a recurring institutional puzzle: who is actually supposed to handle these reports? The answer, according to a 1 Canadian Air Division checklist included in the release, is that the Canadian Armed Forces largely isn't. The internal guidance states that there is a national point of contact for UFO reports, and it is not a military command — historically it was a civilian UFO researcher, Chris Rutkowski, at the University of Manitoba. CIRVIS reports tied to potential air-safety concerns are routed to the appropriate regional Flight Information Centre, while general UFO sightings are directed elsewhere.

One officer puts it bluntly in a January 2018 email, writing that Comox "IS doing the right thing as the CAF is out of the UFO business" and that a policy appears to be in place. Other exchanges show officers at the Regional Joint Operations Centre Pacific in Esquimalt puzzling over an old standard operating procedure for "Unusual Air Sightings / UFO Reports" — one of them noting he had never seen the form before — and asking whether the centre still forwarded sightings to the University of Manitoba researcher at all. The records paint a picture of a military that fields these calls because someone has to, while trying to channel them out to civilian hands as quickly as possible.

The Globemaster Incident and a Quiet Media Correction

One sighting in the file generated enough public attention to pull in the air force's public affairs apparatus. On the night of 30 July 2021, the crew of an RCAF C-17 Globemaster on a flight to Germany reported a bright green object that flew into a cloud and disappeared over the Atlantic near Newfoundland; a KLM airliner in the area reported something similar. The incident was logged in Transport Canada's Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System, and news outlets picked it up — some reporting that the Globemaster had taken "evasive action," including a roughly 300-metre climb, to avoid the object.

The internal emails show public affairs officers across 1 Canadian Air Division, 8 Wing Trenton, and 429 Transport Squadron working to correct that framing. According to the records, the squadron confirmed no evasive action of any kind was taken or required; the course and altitude changes the media linked to the sighting were routine adjustments to reach the aircraft's oceanic entry point. One officer in the thread clarified the distinction sharply — the crew had reported a falling object, not a flying one, "two very distinct conditions." The air force's settled position, recorded in the file, was that while it was not known what the crew saw, there was nothing to indicate it posed a security or safety risk, and there was no intent to investigate further.

The Bigger Picture

Taken together, the release does two things at once. It confirms, in the government's own paperwork, that Canada mounted a named, classified military operation in response to the February 2023 aerial-object shootdowns — a concrete answer to a period that was, at the time, defined by official vagueness about what was floating over the North. And it documents, year after year, how Canada's air defence system actually receives and processes the unexplained: not through a dedicated UFO unit, but through duty officers, control towers, and a referral system that mostly points elsewhere.

That tension sits at the heart of the file. The same air force that insists it is "out of the UFO business" is also the one that stood up OP UAP23 on short notice and tasked aircraft from four wings to go look. The February 2023 events fed directly into the harder strategic conversation about detecting and tracking objects over Canadian airspace — the same pressure now driving Canada's interest in continental missile-and-air defence, as we covered in our look at Canada's push toward the U.S.-led Golden Dome system amid rising Arctic threats. The redactions mean the most interesting questions — what came down, what was found, where — stay sealed. But the records make one thing clear: when something genuinely unexplained appears over Canada, the response is far more organised than the official shrug would suggest.

All documents and figures referenced are from the Department of National Defence, request A-2023-00696, obtained through Canada's Access to Information Act. The 84-page release contains the operational order and warning order for Operation UNKNOWN AERIAL PHENOMENON 23, briefing slides prepared for the Canadian NORAD Region, and internal CIRVIS logs and correspondence recording UFO sighting reports from pilots, air traffic controllers, and the public between roughly 2013 and 2023. Portions of the release are withheld under sections 13(1)(b) and 15(1) of the Act.