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.
Stay tuned. Much more to
come!
Labels: Canada government UFO files NRC RCMP RCAF DND digitized download
