The record exists
Four federal departments filed UFO reports for four decades. The National Research Council kept the formal collection from 1967 into the 1990s, after the Minister of National Defence handed responsibility to it.
Independent archive · not a Government of Canada website
AURORA
Canada kept a UFO file for forty years. This is what is in it.
Between 1947 and the early 1980s, four federal departments collected about 9,500 documents on unidentified flying objects: National Defence, Transport, the National Research Council and the RCMP. The access-to-information releases that followed add roughly 8,759 more pages. Almost none of it is indexed anywhere a person can search. AURORA is that index: the records, the case files, and the live endpoints behind them.
In the file
8,759pages, federal FOIA releases
1,510archival descriptions indexed
4origin departments, 1947–1980s
14recommendations, Sky Canada 2025
01
Canada has no PURSUE. The United States does.
In 2026 the US Department of War began releasing declassified UAP records in dated tranches under PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. Canada has no equivalent: no federal UAP office, no coordinated release, no public account of what the government holds. What follows is the closest thing to a Canadian answer. The fragments that do exist, in one place.
The analysis stopped
When the NRC file closed, nothing replaced it. Pilots still file mandatory reports into Transport Canada's CADORS and police still take reports, but nobody coordinates them or publishes findings. Of everything pilots filed in 2023, 17 occurrences could plausibly be called UAPs.
The precedent, two countries over
The US Department of War's PURSUE system is the closest precedent anywhere: a standing, dated, public release of the same kind of record Canada has never produced. It opened on 8 May 2026 and is on its sixth tranche, released 18 September 2026, with new material posted "every few weeks". Everything published so far is unresolved cases — records the government could not determine the nature of.
Government says so itself
The June 2025 Sky Canada Project report asked for a named federal department to hold UAP data, a dedicated public service, open data, and better reporting guidance for pilots. It made fourteen recommendations. The first is that somebody be put in charge.
02
Where the Canadian file has geography
Eighteen case files with locations, plotted on the provinces and territories they happened in. Two of them — Shag Harbour and Falcon Lake — are the reason Canada's UFO file is famous at all. Select a case to jump to it; the full write-ups are on the case page.
Case files · 18 · oldest first
Boundaries: Natural Resources Canada CanVec · basemap: OpenFreeMap (OpenStreetMap)
03
Five tranches, forty records
Everything here comes out of one of these five releases. Each PDF volume links to the file itself; the database cards link to the live source. Search all forty records →
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04
The cases that rest on a record
Five of the eighteen case files are graded archival or official record — the sighting is documented in the file itself, not just reported. The other thirteen are on the case index, each labelled with how thin its sourcing is.
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05
Eighty years, one file
From the first sighting wave to a busy 1967, a project that ran four years, a file that closed in the 1990s, and a 2025 report that says the problem is coordination.
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06
Straight answers
Each answer stands on its own and names its source.
Has the Canadian government ever confirmed a UFO was alien?
No. Canada has never issued a finding that a UAP is of extraterrestrial origin. The most recent federal position is the Report of the Sky Canada Project, published by the Office of the Chief Science Advisor in June 2025, which reviewed how Canada receives and handles UAP reports and made 14 recommendations. The first is to identify a federal department or agency responsible for managing public UAP data. That has not happened: the Chief Science Advisor's own project page, last modified 3 December 2025, still presents the report as the deliverable and names no lead agency.
Where do I report a UFO sighting in Canada?
There is no single federal portal, and the Chief Science Advisor has stated the Sky Canada Project is not meant to become a reporting service. Pilots and crew file mandatory occurrence reports through Transport Canada's CADORS system. Police forces may take a report if a sighting involves public safety. The Sky Canada survey found 40% of Canadians would not know whom to contact and only 10% have ever reported a sighting. The report's second recommendation is to establish exactly that: a dedicated service that takes reports, investigates cases and posts its findings.
How many sightings are reported in Canada each year?
The Sky Canada report cites public estimates of 600 to 1,000 UAP reports annually from Canadians. Ufology Research's Canadian UFO Survey recorded 570 reports in 2023 and 1,052 in 2025, with more than 26,000 catalogued since the survey began in 1989. The Sky Canada report says pilot-reported UAPs are about 0.08% of everything filed to CADORS — it gives a ratio, not a count.
Are the Canadian UAP records public?
Partly. About 9,500 documents from four federal departments, spanning 1947 to the early 1980s, are digitized and searchable at Library and Archives Canada. Access-to-information releases mirrored here add roughly 8,759 pages, including 29 volumes of the Canada FOIA series and a 2010–2019 CIRVIS compilation. The coverage is uneven: the famous cases are dense, while many witness reports survive only as one-line index entries with no date and no location.
What is CIRVIS?
CIRVIS is Canada's mandatory vital-information sighting reporting system for aircrew and controllers. The standing procedure behind the pilot reports that run through the 2010–2019 compilation in Release 03. Its structure descends from a 1954 Joint Chiefs of Staff instruction, JANAP 146(C), covering reporting of vital intelligence sightings from airborne and waterborne sources. The Canadian Coast Guard ran a parallel maritime instruction, MERINT, for merchant vessels; from 2010 to 2022 only two MERINT reports were filed, both to the Western region.
What happened over the Yukon in February 2023?
On 11 February 2023 NORAD downed an object at about 40,000 feet over central Yukon after it violated Canadian airspace. Canadian and US aircraft were scrambled; a US F-22 fired on it, and the RCMP recovered debris from a lake shore. It was the third such interception in a week — the others were over northern Alaska on 10 February and Lake Huron on 12 February. In November 2024 MP Larry Maguire tabled Written Question 3227 asking how many such objects have been tracked since January 2023, referring to the Yukon object as "UAP 23". No answer is on file.
07
What Canadians actually report
The one part of the record that is still moving. The annual Canadian UFO Survey has run under Ufology Research since 1989 and is the only continuous civilian series; the CADORS figure beside it is the only official one, because no federal body analyses what lands there.
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Read the civilian and official series together and the shape of the problem is clear. Observers file over a thousand reports a year; aviation pilots report unidentified objects in about 0.08% of the occurrences they file. Both numbers are true, and the gap between them is a reporting-system problem rather than a question about the sky. Read the survey and the endpoints.
Whether satellites, drones, planes or atmospheric events, no one would deny that there is more and more activity in the skies above us. Our ability to understand what we observe depends on a multitude of factors, such as time of day, cloud cover, distance and colour contrast.Dr. Mona Nemer, C.M., C.Q., FRSC, FCIC — Chief Science Advisor of Canada, message accompanying the Report of the Sky Canada Project, June 2025
What this project is. AURORA is an independent, non-governmental archive that indexes, mirrors and annotates Canadian UAP records so they can actually be read. It has no relationship to the Government of Canada, and nothing here should be read as an official position.
How it is built. The catalogue mirrors the Library and Archives Canada UFO database's own record index, and points at the live database for every entry. The PDF volumes are the Canada FOIA release series as published through access-to-information requests. Case files are graded: archival or official record, mainstream reporting with named sources, or thin sourcing, verify before citing.
What is missing, on purpose. Maritime MERINT incidents, provincial archives, First Nations community-held accounts, and the unresolved identity of the DND colonel who wrote the Shag Harbour memo. The gaps are marked rather than filled with plausible stories.