Canada.Sky Canada Project · federal scientific review of UAP reporting

In 2022, the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada (OCSA), led by Mona Nemer —a biochemist and cardiovascular scientist appointed the federal government's chief science advisor in 2017—, launched the Sky Canada Project: a systematic review of how the Canadian government manages the public reporting of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). It was not conceived as an investigation of sightings nor as an effort to prove or disprove extraterrestrial life — its object was the reporting mechanism itself, not first-hand data. The project did not collect or analyze photos, videos or individual testimonies; instead it examined how, where and by whom reports are currently received in Canada, what is done with them, and what good practices exist in other jurisdictions.

The resulting report, 'Management of Public Reporting of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in Canada', had a preview version in January 2025 and full publication in mid-2025. Its diagnosis is blunt: Canadians report between 600 and 1,000 UAP sightings per year, and a national survey commissioned for the project found that roughly one in four respondents (around 27%) say they have observed something they could not identify in the sky at some point in their lives — yet since 1995, when the last centralized channel was closed, no federal body has held the mandate to collect or investigate those reports systematically. The result is a fragmented system: reports scatter across the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Transport Canada (via the CADORS civil-aviation incident database), the Canadian Space Agency and private operators such as observatories and citizen-science platforms, with none of them compiling or analyzing them under a common methodology. The consequence, the report argues, is twofold: potentially useful air-safety information is lost, and the absence of a credible channel leaves the field open to misinformation.

The recommendations aim to close that institutional gap. The principal one is to designate a single national lead —a trusted scientific organization, and the report explicitly suggests the Canadian Space Agency— to standardize and centralize the collection of testimonies, investigate cases and publish its analyses. To this it adds enabling a dedicated reporting service (with a hotline and app), opening the data and providing citizen-science tools, and publishing findings and conclusions transparently. The report also specifically recommends that Transport Canada encourage pilots, cabin crews and air traffic controllers to report sightings without fear of professional stigma. The overarching framing stresses scientific rigor and countering misinformation as justification: without a credible, documented channel, the vacuum is filled by stigma, speculation and unverified narratives. The report is clear about what it does not do —it does not investigate specific sightings nor pass judgment on their nature—; its product is a governance diagnosis and a set of recommendations the government may or may not adopt.

It is the Canadian analog of the institutional cycle the corpus already tracks in the U.S. (AARO, PURSUE, UAP Disclosure Act): a Western state acknowledges at the federal-scientific level that UAP reporting deserves formal infrastructure. Its weight is procedural, not probative — the report explicitly does not investigate cases nor pronounce on their nature — but it restructures the problem in Canada: it documents that for three decades there was no institutional owner of the data, and names the cost of that vacuum (stigma, misinformation, 600-1,000 annual reports lost without analysis). Unlike PURSUE (Tier S: executive directive with an operational portal and mandate), Sky Canada is advisory: it recommends, it does not order, and its implementation was left to government decision. Hence Tier A. It pairs with Project Magnet/Second Storey (1950) as the two poles of Canadian state involvement: an operational program in the mid-20th century and a scientific audit of reporting 75 years later. The internal Canadian contrast completes the picture: Paul Hellyer, Minister of National Defence (1963-1967), was from 2005 the highest-ranking official in the world to publicly assert an extraterrestrial presence, without ever producing a document; Sky Canada is the same state approaching the topic the opposite way — data governance and a credible reporting channel, no cosmology.