Two planes report 'bright green UFO' swooping through the clouds over Canada
A military plane may have had to swerve to avoid the mysterious object, surveillance data shows.
Late on July 30, pilots of two separate aircrafts — one military and one commercial — reported seeing a mysterious green UFO vanish into the clouds over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on the Atlantic coast of Canada, Vice News reported.
According to a report posted Aug. 11 to the Canadian government's aviation incident database, both flights witnessed a "bright green flying object" that "flew into a cloud, then disappeared." The object did not impact the operations of either flight, the report noted.
One of the aircrafts that reported the sighting was a Canadian military plane, flying from a base in Ontario to Cologne, Germany. The passenger flight was a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines plane flying from Boston to Amsterdam. Steffan Watkins, an aviation and shipping researcher, looked at transponder data from the two flights and saw that the military plane climbed 1,000 feet (300 meters) in altitude at the time of the sighting — possibly to avoid the object or get a closer look at it, Watkins tweeted.
There's a chance the UFO could have been a meteor streaking through the sky.
"Yes I know [the UFO sighting] would have been at the early stage of the Perseid meteor shower," Watkins added, "but don't be a buzzkill." (The Canadian aviation report tagged the incident with the catch-all label, "weather balloon, meteor, rocket, UFO," not ruling out a space rock as the possible culprit.)
Unlike the U.S. defense department, Canada's Department of National Defense does not track UFO sightings, a department spokesperson told Vice. Still, there is no shortage of civilian enthusiasts north of the border; in December 2019, a private collector donated more than 30,000 UFO-related documents to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg — including scores of documents on the Falcon Lake incident, Canada's most infamous UFO case, Live Science previously reported.
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Meanwhile, in June 2021, the Pentagon publicly released a long-awaited report on more than 140 documented UFO sightings by U.S. Navy pilots. The report concluded that "most of the UAP [unidentified aerial phenomena] reported probably do represent physical objects," though there is no evidence that alien visitors are behind any of the incidents.
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Of course, that's just the unclassified, nine-page version of the report. Some of the report's "juiciest details" hide in a classified annex, which the public will never see, The Guardian reported.
Originally published on Live Science.
Brandon is the space / physics editor at Live Science. With more than 20 years of editorial experience, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts. His interests include black holes, asteroids and comets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.