Canadians want research on UFO sightings, but don’t want to pay for it

OTTAWA — The truth is out there and Canadians think they should know about it — but they don’t want to pay for research into reports of strange objects spotted in the night sky.

Canada’s chief science adviser hired a third-party consulting firm to poll Canadians on how they feel about UFOs, now broadly referred to as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

The survey says the public wants the federal government to proactively release any documents it has on unidentified sightings in the night sky, but there’s little desire to fund investigations.

About half of Canadians think the government needs to do something about reports of UAP sightings and a third said it’s “very important” for the government to make information on reported sightings available to the public.

But only one in 10 feel it’s urgent for the government to shell out funds to investigate those reports.

“Despite the general interest in government action, there is little appetite for public spending on UAP investigations,” the report said. “Enabling citizen science could be used to bridge this contradiction in order to fill the apparent desire for information without a high level of spending.”

Earnscliffe conducted the survey of 1,008 Canadian adults in August last year. The report was only made public by the government recently. It does not carry a margin of error because it’s an online poll.

Interest in UAPs got a big boost in early 2023, when a Chinese spy balloon travelled across Alaska and Western Canada before U.S. forces shot it down off the coast of California.

The polling was purchased to inform the Sky Canada Project, which was launched in 2022 to assess the state of Canada’s procedures for UAP sightings.

Most Canadians do not know what’s behind those uncanny objects in the night sky.

“This is particularly true for those who do not pay attention to stories about UAP,” the survey said.

Just 10 per cent believe it could be aliens or extraterrestrial life — twice as many as those who point to natural causes like weather.

More than a quarter said they have seen an unidentified object in the sky in their lifetime, but only one in 10 reported the event.

About one in every five said they are “very likely” to use a mobile app to document UAP sightings with photos, videos or sound recordings.

The science adviser released an initial report last month that said sightings reported by Canadians are “scattered across multiple government and non government organizations,” since there’s not one dedicated agency to receive them.

It recommends tapping one federal department to be responsible for managing public UAP data, such as the Canadian Space Agency.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 5, 2025.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press