A new survey suggests that the number of Canadians who say they spotted unidentified flying objects last year took a giant leap upward.
In a report released Tuesday, Ufology Research in Winnipeg said sightings of UFOs across the country increased by 46 per cent in 2020.
Chris Rutkowski, perhaps Canada’s most widely-known student of UFOs, told The Canadian Press in a story published Tuesday that 1,243 sightings of levitating discs, erratic spaceships and floating triangular objects were reported.
That averages out to about three a day.
Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s foremost UFO expert, whose day job is at the University of Manitoba is photographed in his Winnipeg home in October, 2016. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods)
While some of the sightings wound up being a satellite, a plane flying at an awkward angle, or light playing tricks, Rutkowski said 13 per cent were unexplained–an average that has remained fairly steady for years.
“There’s a persistent phenomenon that won’t go away,” Rutkowski told CP.
Rutkowski, who has been collecting unusual sightings in the sky since 1989, told CP he doubts UFOs are being operated by extraterrestrial beings.
“As an astronomer, my background suggests there probably is alien life out there, but travelling between stars is very, very difficult.”
After reviewing 30 years of UFO reports, Chris Rutkowski told the CBC’s Darren Bernhardt in December he found 75 cases from Christmas Day. (Raggedstone/Shutterstock)
He suggested there could be two reasons why more Canadians saw objects that seemed out of this world.
Early in the pandemic, the U.S. government released videos of unidentified aerial phenomena recorded by its navy.
“That [drove] some people to look a little more carefully in the sky and believe that UFOs are a little more popular and frequent than one believes,” Rutkowski told CP.
It’s also possible, he said, the pandemic has caused people to think a bit more about their lives and to wonder whether we’re alone in the universe.
“People were spending more time with their families, in their own backyards, and were … appreciating nature and what’s surrounding them [and] UFOs are a part of human culture,” he said.
“This is probably a way of just imagining what life is like in the universe, beyond the borders of our little blue speck in space.”
A list of some 2020 UFO sightings in Canada is HERE.
An RCI interview with Rutkowski is available HERE.
With files from The Canadian Press, CBC News, RCI
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