July 3, 2021
-Global News
On a Friday evening in 2007, Lee and his wife had just returned home for the weekend. After bringing their bags inside, Lee went out to his deck in rural southern New Brunswick for a smoke.
Then he noticed some out-of-place lights at the edge of the woods.
He initially dismissed the lights as “kids on four-wheelers,” he told Global News. But then he wondered if he should check it out, in case someone had suffered an accident in the dark.
“I was going to go back in and grab my keys, and I go to turn around and I see this thing coming out of the wood line, straight up,” he said.
“It had orange lights — bright, bright orange lights — and it comes up vertical just like a helicopter would, and hovers there for a minute or two.
“I can’t see the shape of it… and then all of a sudden it just went vertical, almost vertical, just an unbelievable speed. It was out of sight within two or three seconds. It was just phenomenal.”
Lee says the object didn’t resemble any kind of airplane or helicopter, and it didn’t make any noise. He estimates it was about the size of a small car, though he had a hard time seeing details.
Lee ran inside to tell his wife. She laughed at his story, teased him about seeing “little green men” and then told him to keep the sighting to himself, because others wouldn’t believe it.
He took her advice. Lee is a pseudonym, and he didn’t want his real name printed in case neighbours in his small town thought he was delusional.
It’s been 14 years since Lee saw that “unidentified aerial phenomenon” in the woods. And while the former pilot was reluctant to talk about it at the time, he’s not as alone as he once thought. Canadians are reporting UFO sightings more today than ever before, and the United States government has even started to take them seriously as a potential security threat.
Lee says he still has “no clue” what he saw — but what if it was something extraterrestrial?
“I do believe that it’s possible,” he said. “I do believe that there’s a lot of things that we don’t know exist or possibly exist.”
We still don’t know if we’re alone in the universe, or if we’ve been visited by aliens from other planets. But Lee certainly is not alone in seeing UFOs — not by a long shot.
Canada has a long history of UFO sightings, with approximately three new reports every day, according to research compiled in the Canadian UFO Report by author and ufologist Chris Rutkowski.
There were 1,243 sightings reported across Canada in 2020, a big jump from the previous year, according to Rutkowski’s research. But in general, his reports indicate that sightings have increased over the last 30 years.
Northern lights from another world?
People report everything from just simply lights in the sky to things that have a little more “concrete evidence,” Rutkowski said.
“But the average sighting is simply a light moving in the night sky, and those often have some simple explanations,” he said, saying satellites, drones or aircraft could account for these phenomena.
“Every year, out of the many hundreds of UFO sightings that are recorded, there’s a few handfuls that don’t seem to have an obvious explanation. They don’t seem to be aeroplanes or stars or planets or fireballs, pieces of comets. And we’re not sure what these things are. But it’s a long way from that to say that the aliens are visiting.”
Back in the 1950s, the government took UFO reports quite seriously, according to writer and filmmaker Matthew Hayes.
Hayes, who is now an instructor at Northern Lakes College in Alberta, wrote his PhD thesis on Canadian UFO sightings and is now turning his research into a book.
