UFOs no laughing matter, says MP who wants sightings probed

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/05/2022 (1222 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Canada needs to get serious about UFOs, just as U.S. officials probe unexplained phenomena near nuclear plants, says a Tory backbench MP from Manitoba.

“It started off as a personal curiosity,” said Brandon-Souris MP Larry Maguire, who has been hooked by the issue since 2017 because of media reports.

“It’s not so taboo to talk about it; they’ve shown pictures of the sightings in the national news in the United States,” said Maguire, who is championing the topic as vice-chair of the House of Commons natural resources committee.

Americans refer to the issue as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), to avoid the mental image of flying saucers and big-eyed aliens.

In June 2021, the U.S. director of national intelligence reported on hundreds of sightings of objects that move at irregular speeds and angles, and sometimes evade radar signals. His office wrote that “most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects.”

U.S. military officials expanded on that report in a briefing to Congress on Tuesday, which marked their first in five decades. They said these objects represent a national security risk, particularly for those spotted near nuclear plants.

In Canada, pilots have a legal duty to report unidentified flying objects, but Maguire argues officials need to look for patterns in that data.

“The best thing to do, like the Americans did (Tuesday) would be to put a committee together to look at this, under our defence system, and appoint a person to be the lead on these discussions and gather that information and make more clarity out of it all,” said Maguire.

He suggested Mona Nemer, chief science adviser to the federal government, could be appointed to the job.

A Canadian military briefing last June noted there are “approximately 1,000 UFO sightings reports in Canada each year.” The slideshow presented to former defence minister Harjit Sajjan was obtained by CTV News.

Since 1995, the military has sent reports of UFO sightings to Winnipeg science writer Chris Rutkowski, describing him in the briefing as “Canada’s pre-eminent ufologist.”

Rutkowski said Canada stopped doing comprehensive research on UFO sightings in the 1970s. There are still hundreds of sightings and occasional reporting, but nowhere near the “very intense research” that was done decades ago, he said.

The objects sometimes appear differently on radar systems than what pilots see, and Rutkowski argues that presents a risk of air safety, whether it’s due to technological issues or pilot error or the existence of a foreign object.

“There hasn’t been any consistent and thorough analysis of what has been seen by good observers in the skies over Canada, and I think it’s something that is needed,” said Rutkowski.

“I think (MP Maguire) has a valid question that needs to be answered.”

Rutkowski said efforts by the U.S. to ramp up analysis should benefit Canada, through our shared air defence system. But he’d like to see Canada integrate more civilian research than the Americans’ narrow focus on military findings.

Maguire has been briefed on the issue by U.S. officials, as has at least one unnamed Liberal MP, while an NDP MP has raised an interest in the issue.

Maguire expects to table a motion for a parliamentary committee to probe the issue, although the House will begin its summer break in a few weeks.

He said he’s glad MPs haven’t painted the issue as science fiction, saying that has prevented officials from acknowledging a concern cited by the heads of NASA, the CIA and military observers.

“It’s always been a barrier,” he said.

“We need to have a non-partisan discussion.”

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca