Canadian military suddenly takes notice of UFOs

Commercial pilots have reported several incidents
(https://bit.ly/3w90r1c) of "unexplained aerial phenomena"
in Canadian skies. First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping
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The Canadian Armed Forces appear to be taking UFOs a bit more
seriously after the U.S. military admitted publicly last year that
its pilots kept seeing “unidentified aerial phenomena” they couldn’t
explain.
Last June, the U.S. intelligence community released a long-awaited
report confirming there had been 144 incidents of inexplicable
phenomena.
Documents obtained for CTV News last week by reported Daniel
Otis showed that, in advance of the U.S. release, the top echelons
of the Canadian military called in Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s most
prominent ufologist, for a briefing.
“Yes, I was asked to provide info on UFOs in Canada for a briefing
to the Minister of Defence,” Rutkowski reported on LinkedIn
following the broadcast of the CTV story (https://bit.ly/3FJebmL).
In May 2021, George Young, chief of staff to then-minister of defence
Harjit Sajjan, wrote to the Canadian Armed Forces requesting
a briefing for Sajjan on “any and all research that has been done
by CAF/DND; any sightings that have been reported in recent years;
any historical information that may be on file.” “It should/could
be expected that the imminent US release of information will
prompt questions domestically and with Defence-related implications,”
the email says.
Canada has one of the world’s largest proportions of alleged UFO
sightings. Roughly 1,000 such sightings are annually phoned in to
Ufology Research, the organization operated by Rutkowski since
1989. While the majority of these reports are easily explained as
aircraft or astronomical phenomena (such as a passing satellite),
there have been a handful of incidents in which credible sightings
of unexplained shapes or lights have been recorded by trained pilots.
One of the most notable is a 2016 incident in which the pilots of
an Air Canada Jazz flight over British Columbia reported a “steady
red light” that could not be explained. The details of the sighting
— which can be viewed on CADORS, a federal government database
of civil aviation incidents — have the flight crew witnessing what
they believe to be “another aircraft with a steady red light” while
on a nighttime flight from Prince Rupert to Vancouver. “No other
aircraft was known to be in that vicinity or observed on radar,”
it reads.
Just before Christmas, 2018 in Yarmouth, N.S., two witnesses (one
on land, the other at sea) saw unexplained lights in the sky. What
made the sighting particularly notable was that radar returns from
the area showed an unexplained object right around where the two
witnesses spotted the lights.
In August 2021, a “bright green flying object” was spotted near
Gander, N.L. by two separate aircraft: An RCAF supply flight to
Europe and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight from Boston to
the Netherlands. “It flew into a cloud, then disappeared,” reads the
CADORS report.
Voices within the Canadian aviation community have previously
criticized Ottawa for an apparent lack of curiosity regarding
credible UFO reports.
A 2021 investigation by VICE traced the federal response to the 2016
Air Canada Jazz sighting. Despite being called in by Vancouver air 
traffic controllers as a “vital intelligence sighting,” the federal
government’s response seemed to consist of little more than reviewing
RCAF radar data and then shelving the report once they couldn’t
find anything matching the Air Canada’s pilot’s description.
“All I know is I’m not impressed with the level of investigation,”
veteran RCAF pilot John Williams told VICE at the time.
Critics of the lacklustre federal response don’t necessarily see UFOs
as signs of extraterrestrial activity, but note that they could be
sightings of unknown aircraft or drone technology that could pose
a risk to national security.
This is certainly the position of U.S. authorities. “UAP (Unexplained
Aerial Phenomena) clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose
a challenge to U.S. national security,” reads the June report by the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although the
evidence was slight, the report didn’t rule out the possibility that
UFOs were “foreign adversary collection platforms” or signs that
“a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or
disruptive technology.