Questions outweigh answers in UFO tome

If you love UFOs, this is the book for you.

Thoroughly, impressively researched by an expert in the field, Canada’s UFO Secrets is Chris A. Rutkowski’s 11th book on the topic. Rutkowski has been interested in sightings since the 1950s, seriously researching sightings in Canada since the ’70s. The book boasts a thorough index, a lengthy bibliography and fulsome footnotes that make it a must-have resource for aficionados of UFOs (now often referred to as unidentified anomalous phenomenon or UAPs).

If you don’t love UFOs, this is probably not the book for you.

Canada’s UFO Secrets is thoroughly, impressively researched in such excruciating detail — seemingly not a single reported sighting has been omitted — at the expense of forming a narrative about UFOs in Canada. It’s a book that provides the hows and the wheres and the whens of sightings, but not the whys of what it all means. And that’s a shame — all this research ought to add up to something more.

Post world wars, UFO sightings fascinated the public. Then came a phase where they were considered a joke; politicians avoided mentioning them, fearing being mocked for taking them seriously. In 2017, the floodgates of interest in sightings burst open when the New York Times broke the story that the U.S. government had been studying UFOs to the tune of US$22 million over five years, from 2007 to 2012.

There’s a lot going on in the night skies over Canada to capture the attention of UFO fans. It seems UFOs favour wide open spaces, and Canada, with its vast swaths of open space across its north, must be a favourite of their pilots. We average 500 to 1,000 reports a year, filling a government database with more than 24,000 reports.

Is there any better image of Canada than a UFO harassing fur trappers on snowmobiles, the motors of which stall out whenever the UFO hovers near? Yes, these reports are believed to be just rumours, but still.

As the book points out, all the possible explanations for what that thing in the sky might have been — plane or planet, satellite or bird, balloon or military test — are also unidentified flying objects. They take up a lot of pages while adding little to the discussion.

If anything, the slow methodical drip of information about sightings that can be explained as something not unearthly erodes the reader’s faith in the work behind the writing. What’s the point of referencing such extensive research if it doesn’t bring the reader to a conclusion? At times, it seems like the kind of historical research included is here merely to establish the author’s bona fides. But no need — they are well established by his body of work over decades.

One UFO sighting a Manitoba reader might long to know more about — a “too-close” encounter a weekend prospector, the father of the Rutkowski’s childhood friend, reported in 1967 at Falcon Lake — is merely hinted at in several spots. Rutkowski mentions he has described it in previous books; frustrated readers who haven’t read these books will have to turn to Google to learn the details.

An editor to help with better curation of which sightings, which references from the House of Commons and which buried government reports to include could have formed this story into something of equal interest to both UFO fans and non-fans. Sadly, this one isn’t it.

Julie Carl is a journalist living in Toronto who keeps a close eye on the night sky.