The 2011 Canadian UFO Survey

Geoff Dittman and I have finally finished the 2011 edition of the Canadian UFO Survey.

It is now available online at:  http://bit.ly/2011CDNUFOsurvey 
and the data is at: http://bit.ly/2011CDNUFOdata

The points I made this year included:

• Contrary to what some people might think, UFOs don’t seem to have gone away.
• There were 986 UFO sightings reported in Canada in 2011, approaching three each day.  This is near the record for numbers of reports in one year, when 1,004 reports were received in 2008.
• Ontario had an all-time record high number of UFOs reported in 2011. In fact, the percentage of reports in Ontario compared with the rest of Canada has been increasing steadily during the past ten years.
• In 2011, about 11 per cent of all UFO reports were judged unexplained. This percentage of “unknowns” falls to less than one per cent when only higher-quality cases are considered.
• Approximately one in ten Canadians believe they’ve seen UFOs
• There is an average of two witnesses per UFO sighting.
• The typical UFO sighting lasted approximately 11 minutes in 2011.
• The study found that more than half of all UFO sightings were of simple lights in the sky. Witnesses also reported point sources of light, spheres and boomerangs.

Numbers of reported UFO sightings remain high. Several theories for this can be suggested: more UFOs are present and physically observable by witnesses; more secret or classified military exercises and overflights are occurring over populated areas; more people are unaware of the nature of conventional or natural objects in the sky; more people are taking the time to observe their surroundings; more people are able to report their sightings with easier access to the Internet and portable technology; or even that the downturn in the economy is leading to an increased desire by some people to look skyward for assistance.


Although the largest percentage of reported UFOs is simply lights in the night sky, a small number are objects with definite shapes observed within the witnesses’ frame of reference.


I also emphasized that, popular opinion to the contrary, there is no incontrovertible evidence that some UFO cases involve extraterrestrial contact. The continued reporting of UFOs by the public and the yearly increase in numbers of UFO reports suggests a need for further examination of the phenomenon by social, medical and/or physical scientists.


We'll see how this information is received.