More digitized Canadian government UFO files

 

As many ardent UFO fans will know, many governments around the world have investigated UFO reports, and official documents have been released or found through requests and legal filings.

Canada is one such country, and thousands of documents from the Royal Canadian Air Force, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Department of National Defence and other agencies had been duly stored in the National Archives, now called Libraries and Archives Canada. Because of numerous requests for UFO files, LAC digitized about 9,000 pages of documents from various Canadian agencies and made them available online.

These documents cover a period from about 1947 to 1995, although the digitized materials only go up to 1982 at this point. The documents are fascinating and I detail much of what is in them in my book Canada’s UFOs: Declassified.

What about 1983 to 1995? To date, those are not yet available online, although the paper copies are in the fonds in Ottawa.

I began coordinating the annual Canadian UFO Survey in 1989, gathering all known UFO reports from all sources across the country each year. Included in the annual studies were reports from the National Research Council of Canada and other agencies including the RCMP and DND.

When I donated my UFO files to the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections beginning in 2017, the idea was to digitize the UFO reports for researchers to examine. Today, there is a great surge in making UFO files available to researchers, and I expect my collection will add to the knowledge base of this material.

But this takes time. When the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick acquired the UFO files of the late Stanton Friedman, it was realized that processing the material would be costly and time consuming. In fact, it was estimated that merely indexing the Friedman fonds could take a decade or more.

To speed up the process for at least my own UFO files, I spent many hours sweating over a light table and making digital copies of just the official Canadian government UFO files in my collection. I focused on the years outside those that LAC has already made available. I managed to do the years 1992, 1994 and 1995 and have plans to do 1993 soon (I discovered that my files for that year were incomplete and I am still working on them).

The digitized files needed some renaming and indexing, and so I needed some outside help. As noted ufology historian Isaac Koi of England has been making thousands of international UFO files available on the website of Arkivet för UFO-forskning (AFU) in Sweden, he offered to take my digital files and make them available there. Outstanding UFO researcher John Greenewald has also made them available.

Here is the link to the AFU website where the newly-digitized Canadian government UFO files can be viewed.

Stay tuned. Much more to come!