We're not saying it's aliens, but unidentified aerial phenomena have taken flight over Canada for years

Last week, we reported that the U.S. Defense Department had indeed confirmed that "unidentified aerial phenomena" exist, after leaked footage of UFOs had gotten out to the general public. Now, you may be unsurprised to learn that these flying phenomena are taking the sky to the limit and going international. 

A recent story from VICE World News dives into these unexplained phenomena that have flown through Canadian and international airspace for years now. Over the past 16 years, these incidents have been logged and sent into an online database run by Transport Canada: the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Report System, or CADORS. After combing through some 30 years of data and 300,000 incidents in CADORS, Vice uncovered "dozens" of unexplained sightings from professional aviators.

Some of the reports lack detail, others start simply and then grow. One case of the latter occurred in November 2016 over Lake Ontario. A supposed "donut like" object was flying directly in the path of a Porter Airlines plane, prompting the captain to override the autopilot and put the aircraft into a descent underneath the object. None of the 54 passengers were seriously harmed, though two flight attendants received minor injuries.

Porter, along with other airlines like Air Canada and WestJet, provided no comment to Vice about specific reports such as this. 

Some of these incidents have fairly simple explanations. Around Christmas 2019, there were reports of seeing two dozen "evenly-spaced bright objects in a line," and these turned out to be Starlink internet satellites from SpaceX, which travel in groups and have to be in low orbits.

But others are a little stranger. Take a story from January of that same year, where a Vanguard Air Care crew claimed that an "inexplicable bright light" followed them, matching the altitude and speed of their craft. In such cases, where flying objects or lights couldn't be identified and crossed civilian pilots, Canda's Armed Forces were alerted.

Regardless of what these flying objects are, their proximity to public airspace is concerning. From an air safety perspective, they deserve to be investigated. In that regard, Transport Canada only had this to say to Vice: "Reports of unidentified objects can rarely be followed up on as they are as the title implies, unidentified."