Is the truth really out there?
If you believe Canadian UFO disclosure expert Victor Viggiani, stories of alien visitors have been right in front of us all along.
“The problem is this stuff has been going on for centuries,” he says. “The human family has had a history of things from the sky. Every single Indigenous population on the planet has stories about things or people from the sky and it goes back a long, long way.”
The former elementary school teacher began writing letters asking for documents from the Canadian government detailing military contacts with unknown objects.
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“I got one solid document out of Comox Air Force Base in September of 2001 where two CF-18 were scrambled to chase three unknown tracks of interest,” he says.
The documents, which are labelled secret, detail three unknown lights in the sky, Viggiani said. A medical evacuation plane flying nearby reported similar objects that were moving too fast for it to catch up.
“And then eventually the CF-18s catch up to these things,” he says. “They make contact. It says right in the document. And then the one line reads, CF-18s contact at 35,000 feet, and then after that, it’s redacted. Cute.”
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The sighting is similar to what U.S. navy pilots experienced in 2014 and 2015 when UFOs were captured on their aircraft cameras moving at supersonic speeds. Video of those incidents, which were never explained, was released by the Pentagon. If there is video from the Canadian incident, Viggiani says nobody is saying.
Canada has a rich history of unexplained incidents, which is fueling a substantial community of believers.
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Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a worldwide group that tracks UFO sightings, says it gets between 500-600 sightings per year, which is double what they had just 15 years ago. Still, 90 per cent of the incidents MUFON investigates turn out to be planes, balloons or other manmade objects. Six per cent, it says, are of unknown origin.
One of the first stories of “contact” with aliens in Canada happened in Falcon Lake, Man., in 1967. Prospector Stan Michalak claims he came into contact with a flying saucer which left him with an odd grid of burn marks on his chest.
Also in 1967, over a dozen people in different locations witnessed what they believed to be a late-night plane crash in Shag Harbour, N.S. But when no debris was found and no planes missing, it would become one of the more famous UFO stories in Canada.
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Today, any sighting reported in Canada ends up on the desk of MUFON investigator Dave Palachik. It’s his job to find the truth.
“So maybe, in order to prove what is, you could say, I’m debunking the case, but no, I’m trying to prove what the person saw or witnessed,” he says.
In recent years, he says, the number of hoaxes has gone down, although the number of cases he’s ruled to be “identifiable” has remained at around 90 per cent. One such case over Toronto involved a 50-foot tall cylinder-like object floating in the sky.
“We finally tracked down and got a picture of it from the opposite side,” he says. “And it was a Mr. Peanut from Planters hot air balloon.”
But he says between five to eight per cent of cases every year leave him stumped.
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In Squamish, B.C., a green glowing orb was recorded flying into a forest in 2017. And in 2016, a man in Alberta caught a small shape on his drone camera fly by at incredible speeds, which was similar to reports that came out of two other countries.
What are they? Nobody really knows. Or at least nobody is saying they do.
Two million people have RSVPs to attend an event on Sept. 20 outside Area 51 in Nevada, where many people believe the U.S. is hiding evidence of alien life.
How many show up remains to be seen.
MUFON is holding its Alien Cosmic Expo in Toronto on Sept. 21.