# AURORA — Canada's UAP record

> An independent, non-governmental index of Canada's federal unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) file.
> Not affiliated with the Government of Canada. Nothing here is evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

AURORA indexes Canadian government records on unidentified flying objects: declassified federal releases,
archival descriptions from Library and Archives Canada, graded case files with primary-source links, and
the live open-data endpoints that serve the record today.

## Key facts (with sources)

- Canada collected UFO reports for roughly four decades. About 9,500 digitized documents from four federal
  departments (National Defence, Transport, National Research Council, RCMP) span 1947 to the early 1980s.
  Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/library-archives/collection/research-help/science-technology/ufos.html
- Those documents are reachable only in fragments. LAC's browse interface caps every query at fifty rows and
  its pagination returns the same final page forever, so a single query exposes only the head and tail of its
  result set. AURORA assembled 1,510 distinct descriptions by running 59 queries (each record group, each
  province, and each province-by-group pairing) and taking the union.
- Project Magnet began in 1950, when the Department of Transport let engineer Wilbert Smith research whether
  UFOs could use Earth's magnetic field for propulsion; it was terminated in 1954.
- Project Second Storey was formed in 1952 by the Defence Research Board, chaired by NRC astronomer
  Dr. Peter Millman. Source: Sky Canada Project report, June 2025.
- The National Research Council ran the file from 1967 into the 1990s, after the Minister of National Defence
  transferred responsibility to it.
- The June 2025 Report of the Sky Canada Project (Office of the Chief Science Advisor) makes 14
  recommendations, the first being to name a federal department to hold public UAP data.
  Source: https://www.science.gc.ca/site/science/sites/default/files/documents/sky-canada-report.pdf
- Canada has no equivalent of the US Department of War's PURSUE releases (begun 2026).

## Pages

- / : overview, map, release index, case grid, timeline, FAQ
- /releases.html : 40 records in five tranches, searchable
- /archive.html : 1,510 archival descriptions, searchable and sortable
- /case.html : all case files, graded by sourcing quality
- /map.html : eighteen case locations on an interactive Canada map
- /media.html : verified Canadian documentary and news video
- /data.html : open-government endpoints, live CKAN queries, how to request records
- /case-<slug>.html : one stable, citable page per case (Shag Harbour, Falcon Lake, Gander 1951,
  Gander 1974, Stephenville, the Night of the UFOs, Saint John, Fredericton, Moncton, Clarenville,
  Kensington, Baffin Island, Prince George, Montreal, the Yukon row of lights, the New Brunswick
  protected-airspace report, the Yukon intercept, and the Falcon Lake region wave)

## Data

- /data/releases.json : 40 release records
- /data/lac.json : 1,510 archival descriptions with source URLs
- /data/cases.json : 18 case files with coordinates and source links
- /data/timeline.json : the record year by year, 1947 to now
- /data/media.json : video items, each with the case it documents
- /data/podcasts.json : LAC Discover podcast episodes. [{id, title, len, size, published, org,
  case, note, url}]. media.html renders both sections from these two files.
- /data/endpoints.json : the verified government endpoint list, as data rather than prose
- /data/survey.json : the Canadian UFO Survey series. {"meta": {since, catalogued_total, series_url},
  "years": [{year, reports, unexplained_pct, ...}]}. This is the single source for every survey
  figure on the site; the 2025 row carries the full breakdown, the 35-year average and the
  provincial counts. The series record is 1,982 reports (2012) -- 1,052 in 2025 is the biggest
  year since 2020, not the largest on record.
- /data/canada.json : province and territory boundaries, Natural Resources Canada CanVec 15 m
  Administrative theme (Open Government Licence - Canada). One merged feature per jurisdiction, 13
  in all. Alongside "features" it carries "attribution" (the licence), "source" (the FTP URL), plus
  "credit" and "basemap" -- the two short strings map.js writes into the map's credit line, so the
  credit is data rather than markup. The basemap itself is OpenFreeMap and is not in this file.
- /data/lac_stats.json : measured figures about the 1,510 rows in lac.json, written by the build
  from the same rows it serves, and the file generate_pages.py asserts archive.html's prose
  against. "single_group_query_caps" is how many rows ONE record-group query returns -- LAC browse
  stops at 50 and its sk parameter repeats the last page, so these are page caps, not totals, and
  the four sum to the 206 the page quotes. "by_group" is the union of all 59 queries and is the
  real per-group total. "by_route" records which query surfaced each row. "titles" and
  "distinct_titles" exist because doc_title is a series title, not a description: 7 distinct values
  across 1,510 rows. "shag_harbour_paper_trail" is the 22 Barrington Passage rows, which are only
  reachable by adding a province to a record-group query.

## Conventions

"UAP" means unidentified aerial phenomenon; "UFO" means unidentified flying object. Case files are graded:
archival or official record / mainstream reporting with named sources / thin sourcing. Gaps are marked
rather than filled.