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.
Full Document
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Between September 2008 and February 2024, Transport Canada's Aviation Operations Centre collected more than 40 reports of unidentified flying objects and unidentified aerial phenomena from airline pilots, air traffic controllers, RCMP officers and members of the public. The 154 pages released to The Canada Report contain no investigation of a single one of them.
The records were released under access-to-information request A-2023-00619, which asked Transport Canada for all UFO and UAP reports it had received, all unredacted investigations into those reports, and any ongoing or draft safety policies covering how aircraft should avoid or communicate about such objects. The department produced the reports. It produced nothing for the other two.
What the Documents Show
The file reads less like an investigative case load and more like an inbox. Sightings arrive at the Aviation Operations Centre in Ottawa through five separate channels, and in almost every instance the department's role ends the moment the message is passed along.
NAV CANADA feeds in the largest share as Aviation Occurrence Reports, the same system used to log bird strikes and runway incursions, filed by area control centres in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec and Gander. The Department of National Defence sends handwritten forms by fax from 21 Aerospace Control and Warning Squadron at North Bay. The RCMP phones and writes. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration emails automated incident alerts when a Canadian-registered aircraft reports something in American airspace. And ordinary people submit sightings through Transport Canada's public-facing web forms, including, repeatedly, the drone complaint form, because there is nowhere else obvious to put them.
What happens next is remarkably consistent. The report is forwarded to the CADORS occurrence database, to a regional civil aviation standards office, and sometimes to the NORAD mission crew commander at North Bay. The covering email usually says the report is being sent for information. Then the thread stops. No follow-up correspondence, no analysis, no conclusion, and no record of anyone going back to the witness.
The pattern is familiar from other federal departments. The National Research Council kept quietly logging sightings for decades after officially shutting down its UFO reporting programme in 1995, producing a similar archive of collected-but-unexamined material.
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Five Canadian Airlines Reported UAPs in the File
The most striking material in the release is recent and comes from commercial flight decks. Crews on aircraft operated by Air Transat, Sunwing, Flair, Air Canada and WestJet all reported unidentified objects between April 2023 and February 2024.
Two of those reports arrived two minutes apart. Early on 10 April 2023, the FAA notified Transport Canada that Air Transat 611, an A321 flying from Punta Cana to Quebec City, had observed red and white lights orbiting at 37,000 feet while the aircraft was north-east bound at 35,000 feet, roughly 46 miles south-east of the Hampton navigation beacon off Long Island. The second alert, timed at 02:25 Eastern against the first at 02:23, described Sunwing 383, a 737 flying from Holguín, Cuba, to Halifax, reporting the same lights, at the same altitude, in the same place. Neither crew took evasive action.
Five days later a Sunwing 737 inbound from Cuba reported three lights flashing on and off above a thunderstorm, 10 to 15 miles ahead. That August, another Sunwing flight bound for Toronto described bright circling lights manoeuvring between 40,000 and 60,000 feet while the aircraft cruised at 31,000. In February 2024, an Air Transat A321 near Presque Isle, Maine, reported multiple bright white lights at 55,000 feet that appeared to move rapidly and change direction.
The one incident of this kind reported through Canadian channels rather than the FAA came on 19 January 2024, when Flair 600 and an Air Canada flight both reported multiple lights, sometimes in a triangle formation, between Regina and Winnipeg. The military's summary of that night records three different aircraft reporting at different times, one eastbound and one westbound, describing bright alternating lights somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 feet, changing altitude and travelling at high speed. Under the heading for intercept or identification actions, the form reads: none taken.
The Reports That Stand Out
The single strangest entry dates from New Year's Eve 2010. Kamloops flight information centre filed a report after a caller in Burnaby said he was watching more than 15 objects roughly the size of a football field, shooting green laser beams and dropping green balls of light about 20 feet above his highrise. He phoned again 53 minutes later to say there were now around 50 of them, some landing on Burnaby Mountain and some at Metrotown, and that they had stopped shooting but were, in his words, getting really aggressive. The report was entered into NAV CANADA's occurrence system and attached to Vancouver International Airport. Nothing further appears.
Other entries are harder to wave away. On 12 November 2009, the crew of a Dash 8 flying from Deer Lake to St. John's at 17,000 feet reported an unidentifiable object passing overhead about 35 nautical miles south-west of Gander. The Gander area control centre noted that nothing appeared on either primary or secondary radar.
In April 2011, an RCMP constable from Selkirk Traffic Services mailed Transport Canada a DVD. A police cruiser's camera had recorded a bright yellow and orange light travelling west to east north of Selkirk, Manitoba, at 2:15 in the morning. Controllers checked the radar replay and found a Fairchild Metro climbing through 17,000 feet about eight miles to the north-west at the time. The RCMP wrote back that its officers know what that aircraft looks like and this was not it. A report went to NORAD. The file contains the covering letter and the occurrence report, and nothing about what was on the disc.
In May 2021, someone driving near the Burlington Skyway reported a dark grey object between 100 and 150 feet long, hanging motionless 200 to 300 feet above Lake Ontario just below the cloud base. The reporter described metal-looking surfaces with angles and appendages, said they had taken photographs and inadvertently a short video, and offered to send them in. The release contains the report. It does not contain any reply, and no images appear anywhere in the 154 pages.
The Only Written Procedure in the File Dates From 2005
For a request that asked specifically about safety policy, the procedural content of the release is thin and none of it belongs to Transport Canada.
The document that appears most often is a one-page Wing Operations Centre Instruction titled U.F.O. Reports, numbered 4-7, produced by National Defence and last updated 14 September 2005, with a revised version dated 25 November 2009. It is a form: the operator writes down the caller's name, sky conditions, date and time, location, a description of colour, shape and size, how long the sighting lasted, and anything else pertinent. Step three tells the operator to fax the completed sheet to Transport Canada in Ottawa. Copies in the file are filled in by hand, in English and French, and arrive as fax scans that are in places barely legible.
The only other procedural document is NAV CANADA's CIRVIS checklist, last modified in January 2018. CIRVIS, short for Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings, is a Cold War-era protocol that groups unidentified flying objects together with unidentified submarines, non-Canadian warships, violent explosions and suspicious activity at abandoned airstrips or in Polar regions. It tells the recipient where to forward the information. Like the DND form, it is a routing instruction, not a safety policy — nothing in either document addresses what a pilot should do if an unidentified object is in the way.
The One Sighting That Got an Answer
Across more than 15 years, the records show exactly one sighting being resolved, and it was resolved by coincidence.
On 27 August 2023, the Canadian Air Defence Sector passed along a report from a camper at Duncan Lake, near Gowganda in northern Ontario, who had watched a large white sphere with a long cord hanging beneath it drift north-east. That same morning, the Canadian Space Agency's balloon safety officer had emailed a distribution list — which happens to include Transport Canada's Aviation Operations Centre — announcing that the NIMBUS-4 stratospheric balloon was in flight from Timmins. Staff connected the two and said so in writing. The explanation did not come from an investigation. It came from being on the right mailing list.
What's Missing from the Documents
The request had three parts, and the gap between what was asked and what arrived is the clearest finding in the release.
The first part, all reports of UAP or UFO made to Transport Canada, was answered at length. The second, all unredacted investigations into those reports, produced nothing — and the records that were released are themselves redacted throughout, overwhelmingly under section 19(1) of the Access to Information Act, which protects personal information, with a scattering of section 16(2)(c) withholdings. The third part, any ongoing or future draft safety policies on UAP avoidance or communication, produced nothing at all.
Two internal exchanges suggest why the investigation file is empty. In April 2023, a man in Memramcook, New Brunswick, phoned Transport Canada about an object he said had appeared over several nights in a series of shapes — a snake, a seahorse, a wristwatch, a cloud, a postage stamp — lime green with white lights. He had spent $175 having photographs printed and enlarged, wanted an official to examine the physical prints, and said he would go to the press if nobody responded. An inspector called him back and wrote up detailed notes. A technical team lead replied that they could attach the email to the record and close it. Two months later, a certification officer asked colleagues how to handle a public report of a large shiny sphere seen near Edmonton International Airport. The regional manager's answer was to file it as completed.
Neither exchange shows anyone declining to investigate on the grounds that it is not Transport Canada's job. The question does not come up. There is no threshold in the file for what would trigger a closer look, no criteria for distinguishing a balloon from a hazard, and no named office that owns the question. That absence is what the third part of the request was aiming at, and it went unanswered — though other departments have clearly done more than route paperwork, as National Defence records describing a Canadian military operation to recover the objects shot down over Canadian airspace in February 2023 make plain.
What the release does establish is that Canadian commercial aircraft are reporting objects their crews cannot identify, that those reports reach the federal aviation regulator through at least five different doors, and that once inside, they stop.
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Support Government FilesAll documents and figures referenced are from Transport Canada, request A-2023-00619, obtained through an Access to Information request. The release contains 154 pages of UFO and UAP sighting reports received by Transport Canada's Aviation Operations Centre between September 2008 and February 2024, along with related correspondence and reporting forms.
