For decades, a team of Canadians has documented reports of unidentified flying objects, commonly known as UFOs.
Every year since 1989, Ufology Research has released the Canadian UFO Survey, a summary of all major sightings of UFOs reported in Canada. For the last two years, South Cariboo’s Leanne Sallenback has been helping write the report as Ufology Research’s communications specialist.
“It’s a fascinating time, because there is a renewed interest in this topic, especially with (U.S. President Donald) Trump talking about releasing the UFO files in the U.S.,” Sallenback said. “The stigma of talking about UFOs and reporting them is also going away, so you will start to see a lot more engagement in this field in the coming years.”
On Monday, March 9, Ufology Research published the results of the 2025 Canadian UFO Survey. Sallenback said this year the team, led by report founder and editor Chris Rutkowski, documented 1,052 reports and sightings from across the country from 1,006 different witnesses. B.C. ranked third in reported sightings at 131, trailing behind Ontario’s 307 and Quebec’s 210.
Sallenback said Ufology Research gathers its data from several sources, including Transport Canada, Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center, pilots and the general public via social media posts. Despite these efforts, she noted many more cases go unreported and unrecorded.
“We do encourage everyone who has seen something suspicious to report it,” Sallenback said. “They can do so on our website at www.canadianuforeport.ca on the ‘Report a Sighting’ page.”
While UFOs are associated with belief in extraterrestrial life visiting our planet, Sallenback said the Ufology Team goes out of its way to exhaust all other possibilities. She noted the team looks at flight paths, the path of the International Space Station, planetary alignments, rocket fuel dumps, drone activity and other publicly available data to rule out potential causes.
Of the 1,052 sightings this year, she noted only 3.42 per cent remain unexplained.
“It should be emphasized the classification of Unknown does not imply alien visitation. Each case may still have an explanation following further investigation. And of those that remain unexplained, they may remain unexplained, but still are not incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial intervention or some mysterious natural phenomenon,” the report states.
Most UFO sightings are reports of lights in the sky, often either white or multicoloured. Sallenback said these lights are just that, nocturnal lights, and were determined to be the cause of 50.24 per cent of all reports. The remaining 49.78 per cent of sightings are broken up into several categories, with nocturnal disc and daylight disc being the next most commonly spotted phenomena.
Broken down by the number of witnesses, the vast majority of sightings were seen by only one person. According to Ufology Research, the average number of people per sighting is 1.72, the same as in 2024.
The average duration of sightings, meanwhile, was 47 minutes, an increase from last year’s average of 36 minutes. The report notes that the length of a sighting can help determine what the sighting likely was. Short-duration events are usually fireballs or bolides (large meteors), while long-duration events of an hour or more are typically astronomical objects moving with the Earth’s rotation.
One thing that both Sallenback and the report highlight is the lack of a central repository for information, both public and private. They advocate for the creation of a dedicated federal office that would receive and catalogue reports of UFOs and UAPs.
“It’s important to do the work and collect the data. Chris is Canada’s leading Ufologist and is an advisor to the government on various projects as well,” Sallenback said. “There are definitely ways we could work collaboratively with the government in the future on UFO data collection and analysis.”
In the meantime, Sallenback noted that since 1989, 26,000 Canadians have had their sightings documented by the report. She encourages anyone in the South Cariboo and beyond to report any unexplained phenomena in the sky to www.canadianuforeport.ca.
“There have been reported sightings in 100 Mile House submitted over the years, but I also know that a lot of people don’t think to report them,” Sallenback said. “Keep your eyes on those Cariboo skies and report anything unusual.”