Library and Archives Canada created a virtual exhibit called “Canada’s UFOs: The Search for the Unknown” — a searchable online database of 9,830 UAP sighting reports filed with Canada’s Department of National Defence between 1947 and 1995. The database has since been decommissioned. The collectionscanada.gc.ca URL returns errors. The records themselves — digitised and indexed — represent one of the largest publicly accessible national UAP sighting databases ever assembled by a government.
What made the Canadian database significant was not just its scale. It was the government programmes that ran alongside it — particularly Project Magnet, which suggests that at least some Canadian officials were not treating these reports as noise.
What the Database Contained
The 9,830 reports span 48 years of sighting documentation. Reports came from civilian members of the public, military personnel, commercial pilots, police, and scientific observers. They were submitted through National Defence channels and retained in the federal record system. The database allowed searches by date, province, description, and other parameters. It covered:
- The 1947 Kenneth Arnold wave and subsequent Canadian reports from the same period
- The 1952 sighting wave that prompted Churchill’s memo in the UK and the Washington DC overflights in the US
- Reports from the northern territories, including areas of particular military and scientific sensitivity
- Incidents that overlapped with Project Magnet’s active research period
- Military and civilian pilot encounters through the Cold War years
Project Magnet: Canada’s Secret UAP Research Programme
Project Magnet ran from 1950 to 1954. It was led by Wilbert Brockhouse Smith, a senior engineer with Transport Canada’s Department of Transport. Smith had no fringe profile — he was a credentialed government scientist who had applied for and received official authorisation to investigate UAP using scientific instruments.
Smith’s investigation led him to build a detector station at Shirley’s Bay, Ontario — a purpose-built facility designed to detect magnetic and gravitational field anomalies associated with UAP sightings. The station recorded multiple anomalous readings during its operation. Smith’s conclusion, documented in his Project Magnet final report, was that UAP were real, of non-human origin, and that their propulsion operated on magnetic and gravitational principles that were beyond current human scientific understanding.
The Canadian government did not publicly endorse Smith’s conclusions. But they funded his research, gave him the station, and kept his reports. The Project Magnet final report is among the documents digitised in the Library and Archives Canada collection.
The Oracle Assessment
Canada’s UAP programme has been underreported in the context of the global disclosure movement. The 9,830 reports represent a sovereign national dataset, assembled over 48 years, that is distinct from US Air Force Blue Book, distinct from the UK DEFE series, and distinct from any of the intelligence programmes being disclosed through PURSUE. Smith’s Project Magnet is particularly significant because it was a government-funded scientific programme that produced a positive finding — not a debunking exercise. That finding was quietly shelved. The records survive.
Source: Library and Archives Canada. “Canada’s UFOs: The Search for the Unknown.” Decommissioned database, formerly at collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/ufo/. Project Magnet final report, 1954.