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Passenger and Military Jets Both Report Seeing a UFO Over Eastern Canada

A July 30 report describes a “bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud, then disappeared.”
A Canadian military transport plane sits on the tarmac at CFB Trenton.
A Canadian military transport plane reported seeing a UFO over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on July 30. File photo by Lars Hagberg/The Canadian Press

On the night of July 30, a Canadian military and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight reported a UFO over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

According to an aviation incident report posted on the night of Aug. 11, both flights “reported seeing a bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud, then disappeared” in a stretch of open water between Quebec and Newfoundland. 

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The KLM passenger flight (KLM618) was travelling from Boston to Amsterdam while the Canadian military transport aircraft (CFC4003) was flying between CFB Trenton, a base in Ontario, and Cologne, Germany. 

Few other details were made available in the report, which appeared in CADORS, the Canadian government’s flight incident archive. In a previous story, VICE World News showed how this digital database contains dozens of UFO reports from airlines such as Air Canada, Porter, and WestJet. In a June investigation, VICE World News revealed how Canadian military personnel have been reporting UFOs for decades.

Whatever they are, these kinds of enigmatic objects and lights have caught the attention of the U.S. government, which has openly investigated UFOs for years and recently released a report on 143 U.S. military sightings, including objects that appeared to “maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.” 

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Canada, by contrast, appears far less interested. In a recent statement to VICE World News, a spokesperson from the Department of National Defence said, “We do not track reports or collect information about sightings” of UFOs.

Have an unusual observation or document to share? Reach out to Daniel Otis via Twitter at @dsotis or email otisstories (at) gmail (dot) com.

The Canadian Boeing C-17 Globemaster transport plane was travelling to Europe as part of a mission to bring at-risk Afghan personnel to Canada

Data posted to Twitter by aviation and shipping researcher Steffan Watkins shows the Canadian flight changing course and altitude around the time of the sighting, which might actually have occurred on July 31. 

“Those were simply for the aircraft to reach its oceanic entry point and altitude,” a Canadian military spokesperson told VICE World News. “No evasive action of any kind was taken or required.”

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The spokesperson said Canada's air force also has “no intent or need to investigate this further.”

“In this particular incident, there is nothing to indicate that what the crew saw posed any kind of safety risk to the aircraft,” they added. “We believe that they saw something—they would not have filed a report otherwise.”

KLM airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson from Nav Canada, the private company that operates Canada’s air traffic control system and whose employees would have received the initial reports, told VICE World News that “there is no additional Nav Canada information available for these events.”

In all statements relating to its aviation reporting system, Transport Canada cautions the “reports contain preliminary, unconfirmed data, which can be subject to change.”

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This article has been updated throughout to reflect recent developments.