Archival index · 1,510 descriptions · 59 queries · 4 record groups
Library and Archives Canada holds roughly 9,500 digitized documents on UFOs, accumulated between 1947 and the early 1980s by four federal bodies: the Department of National Defence, the Department of Transport, the National Research Council and the RCMP. What follows is that database's own index — 1,510 descriptions, sortable, with a direct link into the live record for every entry.
This is an index, not the documents. Every entry carries a record number and a link into the live record; 1,357 of them also carry a document date and 1,311 name a location. Sighting dates are free text and are mostly absent, which is LAC's own caveat rather than a limit of this scrape.
Each is a different institution with a different reason to be writing things down.
552 descriptions, the largest group, across three series. The biggest is “Intelligence: Sighting of unknown objects”, cross-referenced to microfilm reel T-3291 (320 entries); 203 sit in the Herzberg file and 29 under “Target detection: Search: Flying saucers”. Fonds ISN 13019. Almost every province-by-group query lands here, which is why this group grew the most.
52 descriptions: 50 under “Transportation: General: Unidentified Flying Objects” and 2 under the CIRVIS/MERINT series. Civil aviation and marine reporting. Fonds ISN 37061.
396 descriptions, every one of them held by the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics as “Reports on non-meteoric sightings”. The scientific file, kept after the 1967 transfer of responsibility. Fonds ISN 1017 / 4693.
510 descriptions, all of them filed as national research requests routed through police files, citing the Radio and Electrical Engineering Division. Fonds ISN 37024.
It is a series title, not a summary of the individual document, and there are only seven distinct values across all 1,510 rows. LAC files its UFO collection as numbered series and gives each one a standing title; a row tells you which series a record belongs to, its record number, and where to fetch it. It does not tell you what is on the page. The documents themselves are scanned images and are not described at item level — that is a limitation of the source, and no amount of scraping gets around it.
Library and Archives Canada's UFO database is public, searchable and, for most researchers, unusable as it stands. This is the specific reason.
Every query returns at most 50 rows, whatever the result set. There is no total count anywhere on the page, so the interface gives you no way to know how much you are not seeing.
The sk parameter looks like an offset and it is not. Page two
jumps to the last fifty records, and every page after that returns those same fifty
records again. Paging through the National Research Council file yields fifty distinct records
and then repeats forever.
The only way deeper is to vary the query. AURORA runs 59 of them: four record groups, eleven provinces, and all forty-four province-by-group pairings, then takes the union. That turns 206 visible records into 1,510.
A single query returns the first fifty rows and the last fifty rows, and nothing in between. The archive was never incomplete. It was just not reachable through the interface that describes it.Measured against the live database, September 2026 · reproducible with the query patterns below
What this means for the numbers on this site. 1,510 is a floor, not a total. Every description LAC holds that can be reached by varying the query is here, and the collection itself is documented at roughly 9,500 documents. The gap between those two numbers is not lost data in any meaningful sense; it is the part of the collection that no combination of the interface's own query fields exposes.
What the index is honest about. Of 1,510 descriptions, 1,357 carry a document date and 1,311 name a location. Sighting dates are free text and largely absent, which is LAC's own caveat, not an artefact of this scrape. Where a field is empty, the table says so rather than guessing.
Query the National Research Council record group on its own and you get 49
rows — all of them with no location cited at all. Now add ?q4=NS to the same query and a
further 22 rows appear, every one of them reading
Barrington Passage, NS, sighting date 10/5/1967, filed between
15 November and 19 December 1967. That is the paper trail for the Shag Harbour sighting of
4 October 1967: Barrington Passage and Shag Harbour are both in the Municipality of the District
of Barrington, Shelburne County.
Not one of the 22 is reachable from the record-group query alone. Asking about Nova Scotia and the NRC is the only way in, and asking only about the NRC is the only way LAC presents them — as 49 records with nothing in the location column.
Search any field, filter by record group, sort by date. “Not cited” means the archival description has no value for that field.
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The LAC database is public and browsable. These are the query patterns that work — by department, or by province.
?q7=National+Research+Council sets the record group. Also works for Department of National Defence, Department of Transport, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.?q4=NB sets the province or territory. NB, NS, NL, PE, MB, ON, QC, BC, YT all return records.?q4=Nfld, not ?q4=NL. LAC's province codes are their own: Newfoundland is Nfld and Prince Edward Island is PEI, and the standard abbreviations return nothing.?q4=NB&q7=Royal+Canadian+Mounted+Police — the pairing that reaches records no single query returns. This is the shape of all forty-four matrix queries behind this index.