‘Fly WestJet, see a UFO’

The truth is out there — or at least it could be outside the cockpit of a WestJet flight.

In an incident reported by NAV Canada to Transport Canada on Friday, WestJet pilots had reported they had flown by “a basketball-sized object at 13,000 feet” during a flight from Winnipeg to Calgary on Jan. 19.

The pilots, of flight WJA485, were flying just northwest of Canmore at the time and descending to land in Calgary when the incident occurred.

NAV Canada has classified the incident, under occurrence event information, as a “weather balloon, meteor, rocket, CIRVIS/UFO.” CIRVIS stands for Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings.

An official for WestJet could not be reached for comment.

Chris Rutkowski, the country’s top UFO expert who is part of the Manitoba-based Ufology Research, said it would be nice to know exactly what the pilots saw during the flight.

“Fly WestJet, see a UFO could be their new slogan,” Rutkowski said laughing.

“But the report says they were passing by a basketball-sized object so it is implied it was standing still. They also didn’t describe it as a balloon. If it was a balloon, pilots would call it a balloon.”

Rutkowski said commercial drones don’t fly as high as 13,000 feet in the air.

“Every day there are incident reports with birds and even they can cave in the nose cone or put a dent in the wing — I don’t know what would have happened if they had hit this.”

Rutkowski, who recently released the 2025 Canadian UFO Survey, said the incident joins a few hundred sightings already sent in this year to the UFO tracking organization. Last year, more than 1,000 sightings were reported from across the country.

“We have a handful already reported by pilots,” he said.

“These are people we put our lives in their care and, if they are having problems with their power of observation, there would be a concern.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca