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Next time you are going for a walk outside, maybe take a look at the sky and see if you spot anything unusual.
The 2025 edition of the Canadian UFO Survey was released Monday, which says that the number of sightings of unidentified flying objects was at its highest point since the COVID-19 pandemic, but has not topped the number reported during 2020.
The 2025 numbers show 1,052 UFO reports were shared in Canada, involving “participating private organizations, and through social media.”
Those 1,052 sightings are in contrast to the 1,008 in 2024, 570 in 2023, 768 in 2022, 722 in 2021, and 1,243 in 2020, which was up from 849 in 2019.
Out of all those 2025 reports, 3.42 per cent were classified as “unexplained.”
Rutkowski also stated that one in 10 Canadians believe they have seen a UFO.
“It cuts across all demographics, and all areas of Canada,” he said. “If you’ve seen a UFO, you are definitely in very good company.”
Rutkowski stated that the number of reported cases had been declining as of 2012, which was the highest reported number of cases with 1,982 since the survey began in 1989.
However, this year’s 1,052 sightings are the highest since 2020, when 1,243 sightings were documented.
“Over the past few years and certainly after the pandemic, after that point people started taking a renewed interest and I would imagine some of that renewed interest came from some objects flying in the sky,” he said.
In 2023, the number of reported cases sat at 570, indicating a difference of 482 cases compared to 2025 reported cases.
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“There certainly is a concern about people being a little watchful and wondering what’s going on up there,” Rutkowski said.
Rutkowski also noted that there has always been a stream of reports from “coast to coast to coast” across Canada since 1989, surrounding all Canadian provinces and territories.
“The number of reports in a given area is related to population, of course we get more reports from Ontario, Quebec and B.C., but there are some irregularities,” he said.
“For example, Manitoba and Newfoundland had significant increases in UFO numbers, whereas in Alberta and B.C. we saw decreases in numbers. Why? We are really not sure, but it really proves that there is more to the UFO phenomenon that bears more understanding.”
In 2025, Ontario led the pack with 30 per cent of the total number of UFO reports, Quebec claimed about 20 per cent, B.C. had 13.5 per cent and Alberta had about 11 per cent.
Both Manitoba and Nova Scotia saw significant increases in numbers of reported UFOs in 2025, with 55 and 117 cases, respectively.
The report says that the higher number of reports in Nova Scotia was “likely because Nova Scotians have very active UFO-related social media where witnesses can report their UFO sightings easily.”
In terms of metropolitan cities in Canada, Toronto finished first with 53 UFO reports, Vancouver with 45, Montreal with 30, Calgary with 28 and Edmonton with 23.
What was also different in this year’s findings was the time of year in which these sightings were reported.
According to the survey, “reports were in the late summer and winter instead of mostly summer
months as usual.”
“We’ve actually noticed for several years now that the peak in August has been more prevalent, and that’s not intuitive in Canada because of our winters that there would be more people outside in the middle of summer seeing and reporting things in the sky, and yet it’s not June and July, which are the warmest months but August had more reports of UFOs,” Rutkowski said.
“In the middle of winter in January 2025, there was a number of UFO reports compared to most other months as well, so it’s not just a matter of the weather.”
The survey also states that the average duration of Canadian UFO sightings was 47 minutes, a “very significant” increase over 2024 (36 minutes), 2023 (16 minutes), and 2022 (13 minutes).
The survey indicates that the length of time a UFO is detected is actually “one of the biggest clues to its explanation.”
“Experience in studying UFO reports has shown that short duration events are usually fireballs or bolides, and long duration events of an hour or more are very probably astronomical objects moving slowly with Earth’s rotation,” the survey reads.
The survey also states that the peak times in which sightings were documented “has usually followed a similar pattern every year, with a “peak at 2200 hours local and a trough around 0900 hours local.”
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