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Did the CBC Just Confirm the Existence of Aliens?

The public broadcaster's UFO reporting has really gone to shit in the wake of the Conservative's budget cuts.
Ayy lmao. Image via Tumblr

Based on a cell phone video shot in the middle of the night by a camper on the shores of Prince Edward Island in June 2014 showing two tiny specks of light in a field of complete blackness, a UFO organization has deemed the incident as one of the best UFO sightings in the Maritimes. Today—about a year and a half later—the CBC released a 700-word article detailing the encounter and giving credit to Mufon UFO Network, a volunteer organization dedicated to studying what it calls Unidentified Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), for naming it "1 of very few confirmed cases."

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Punctuated by commentary such as "it reminds me of a dreidel or a spin top—very big, very bottom-heavy too… It's not a ship, because we would see a bottom to it," the video shot by a Moncton man, John Sheppard, at Twin Shores Campground in Kensington, PEI, runs nearly eight minutes long showing the exact same scene throughout. About a quarter of the way through, Sheppard clicks on a flashlight to see if it will make a difference. "Not really," he says excitedly, clicking the flashlight off.

While it's unlikely that the case will be proven as an authentic sighting, due to the overwhelming possibility of confirmation bias from as organization with a niche focus on UFOs, that didn't stop the CBC from citing Mufon's "extensive investigation." It seems that Canada's national public broadcaster (which is heavily funded by taxpayer dollars), has apparently begun giving credence to the existence of aliens. The article did not contain any dissenting sources speaking on the sighting ("that was our plane," the military could have said, but who knows), but instead focused mainly on describing the experiences of Sheppard, who shot the video, and quoting of a MUFON "expert."

Following a subhead entitled, "Adrenaline starts to kick in," is the ensuing description:

"As the light show continued, Sheppard admits he started to feel unsettled as his adrenaline kicked in… He continued filming but huddled close to a bush so he was hidden.

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'I didn't want to be seen by it. I didn't want it coming over.'"

Though the case was reported in the top 10 MUFON sightings of 2014, CBC only picked up on it "after a recent re-posting by [MUFON]." The CBC then went on to explain that Stu Bundy, the assistant director of MUFON, said that "every effort was made to explain what Sheppard had captured on tape," though not much further explanation of these methods of investigation were revealed in the article.

According to the CBC, MUFON is still monitoring the area where the PEI sighting occurred and claiming that they've been unable to prove that the blinking lights seen in the sky being a regular aircraft or even a drone—their internal "drone expert" didn't think that was a plausible explanation.

We're not about to dismiss the possibility that aliens exist—I mean, fuck, they probably do—but you have to admit that this is a pretty flimsy case.

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