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There have been over a dozen UFO sightings reported by commercial airline pilots in Canada in recent years.
One too-close encounter even forced a plane to dive to avoid it, injuring two flight attendants, while a 'shiny, silver object' was seen over Toronto, and one pilot spotted an aircraft in 2018 that appeared to be moving at Mach 4 - making it faster than any known aircraft in the world.
The revelation comes shortly after the CIA declassified two thousand documents on UFOs over America, dating back to 1970s.
The XXXX dossier with nearly 3,000 pages of documents about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) - the US government's official term for what are commonly called UFOs - was published on The Black Vault in January.
A DailyMail.com review of the files uncovered a bevy of perplexing - yet unverified - accounts of mysterious disks tracking across the sky, spewing beams of light across small towns, causing explosions and even a few claims of military officers confronting aliens that come out of outlandish vehicles.
Other documents show correspondence between CIA officers about the UFO sightings. Sometimes the officers brush off observers' stories as purely superstitious, even when another explanation isn't clear. But in several instances the officers show genuine concern that perhaps something XXXXX is at play.
In Canada, the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Report System (CADORS), operated by federal department Transport Canada, has a database of almost 300,000 incident reports, which include any event involving an aircraft, not just UFO sightings.
UFOs don't necessarily confirm the presence of aliens, as some believe, but simply demonstrates there are objects in the sky that are hard to identify.
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CADORS is searchable, although knowing the correct terms to search with is tricky - for instance, a search back to 2000 looking for 'UFO' populated just one result.
Nevertheless, there are dozens of reports of potential UFO sightings hidden deep in the CADORS archives.
There were several notable incidents, most of them happening in recent years, although one intriguing one took place in 2005.
On October 21, 2005, local air traffic controllers 'received reports from four aircraft flight crews of a shiny, silver object over Toronto.'
It was reported to be 30,000 feet above the ground, at which point it suddenly turned and moved quickly southeast to Lake Ontario.
Another incident happened on January 10, 2015, 'multiple aircraft reported a very large object with a small white light in the middle, surrounded by a halo' as it appeared to come down from 41,000 feet in the air.
That incident reportedly took place before dawn.
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On May 30, 2016, an Air Canada Express flight traveling from Montreal to Toronto reported an 'unidentified flying object, round in shape,' which was traveling at more than 550km/h.
Arguably the most significant incident came in November of the same year.
On November 14, 2016, a Porter Airlines flight at over 8,000 feet dove to avoid an object that was 'solid.and shaped like an upright doughnut or inner tube.'
Initially, the object was described only as not likely being a balloon, but two crew members were injured, prompting a Transportation Safety Board (TSB) investigation into the incident.
The TSB report, which came two weeks after the incident, claimed the object was 'approximately 5 to 8 feet in diameter.'
It also stated that the 'captain overrode the autopilot in order to quickly descend the aircraft under the object,' which is how the two flight attendants were injured as they were securing the aircraft.
None of the 54 passengers were hurt in the incident, though.
'TSB was not able to positively identify the object,' the agency said to VICE World News.
Another incident happened on March 16, 2017, when two WestJet flights near Okanagan Valley in British Columbia saw a 'bright, white strobe-type light' above them at night.
The vague details in the CADORS and the low number of reports over the years suggests many potential UFO sightings are going unreported.
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Former Royal Canadian Air Force pilot John 'Jock' Williams believes many more sightings never make official reports.
'Pilots are probably not reporting about 90 per cent of the things they're seeing, because they know it could have lengthy career implications. For most pilots, it's not worth it,' Williams continued.
'That's why I believe that each of these guys saw what they reported.'
Transport Canada chose not to comment on the individual observations made by airline crews.
'The events that are entered into CADORS are entered as they are reported to Transport Canada,' a spokesperson for Transport Canada said to VICE World News.
'Transport Canada endeavours to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the data contained within CADORS. However, the information within should be treated as preliminary, unsubstantiated, and subject to change.'
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Some of the events recorded do have explanations, such as the flights that saw 'up to two dozen evenly-spaced bright objects in a line' on December 26, 2019, with it later being identified as SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites.
A UFO investigator told VICE World News that the sightings of these potential UFOs are concerning.
'CADORS clearly shows that these types of incidents are occurring in airspace where thousands of passengers are potentially travelling every day,' Chris Rutkowski said.
'Regardless of one's belief or disbelief in UFOs, this is certainly a concern from a flight safety and public welfare perspective.'
Perhaps no incident was harder to explain than what a Kalitta Charters Boeing 747 cargo flight saw on April 30, 2018.
The plane was travelling above the Northwest Territories as it was traveling from New York to Alaska.
Suddenly, a member of the crew saw 'an object flying sporadically, estimated at (60 to 80 thousand feet) and moving at Mach 4.'
There was no way for the crew to accurately measure the speed, but Mach 4 would make it the fastest moving object in aviation history.
That mark previously belonged to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, which traveled at speeds just above Mach 3.3 before being retired in 1999.
The report of that sighting took over a year and a half to add to CADORS, suggesting that the moment left a long-lasting impression on the flight's crew.
Rutkowski helped lead a survey recently that noted a marked increase in UFO sightings in 2020.
According to CTV News, there was a 46 percent increase in UFO sightings in Canada in 2020 - a total of 1,243 sightings - likely spurred by the coronavirus pandemic as more people stayed home and turned their attentions upwards.
Rutkowski claimed that 13 percent of the sightings had no explanation at this point.
Reports of the Canadian sightings come a year after the Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of three videos captured by U.S. Navy fighter jets that appeared to show UFOs.
In late February, the FBI confirmed it was 'aware' of an American Airlines flight which had a close encounter a fast-moving, 'long cylindrical object' on a trip from Cincinnati to Phoenix.
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The encounter, which occurred at 36,000 feet above the remote northeast corner of New Mexico, west of Des Moines on Sunday, involved AA Flight 2292, an Airbus A320, according to The Drive.
The apparent encounter shares various similarities with another incident that occurred in the same area just under three years ago.
In that incident, two pilots on different aircraft - a Learjet and an Airbus - reported having close encounters with a mysterious object flying above them.
Last week, the Pentagon confirmed that a set of images and videos showing unidentified flying objects buzzing over Navy warships off the coast of California in 2019 'were taken' by branch personnel.
Last week, the Pentagon confirmed that a set of images and videos showing unidentified flying objects buzzing over Navy warships off the coast of California in 2019 'were taken' by branch personnel.
The photos were leaked from a Pentagon investigation of UFOs by the UAP Task Force, which has been gathering evidence for a report for Congress that's due in June.
The images, obtained by filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, show unidentified objects flying above four US destroyers, including the USS Kidd Navy destroyer, in 2019.
One of the images appears to be a pyramid-shaped object while others were thought to be drones or balloons; however, the Navy has listed them as unknown.
The confirmation comes a week after Admiral Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, admitted that he has no idea where the swarm of mysterious Tic Tac-shaped drones that menaced four US destroyers in July 2019 originated.
When the Pentagon declassified the three Navy videos last year, they admitted they didn't know what was seen in them.
'The Department of Defense has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017,' said Susan Gough, a Defense Department spokesperson in a statement.
The statement added that the videos were released after a 'thorough review' which determined that the unclassified videos do 'not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.'
One of the clips shows the 2004 'Tic Tac' incident that was recorded over the Pacific Ocean. A second video was captured off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, in 2015.
Lawmakers have been calling for the Pentagon for years to open up its classified records about the encounters, citing national security concerns.
In January, as part of a COVID-19 relief package, Congress set a deadline of June 1 for US intelligence agencies and the Defense Department to release UFOs and unidentified aerial phenomena.
Also in January, the CIA declassified around 2,000 documents related to UFOs dating back to the 1970s.
A dossier with more than 700 files about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) was published on The Black Vault website.
One of the reports describes how seemingly urgent UFO information was hand-delivered to the CIA's deputy director for science and technology in 1976.
Most details about the information were redacted in the document on The Black Vault website.
A second document from June 1976 appears to request an update on the review, but there is no record of the ordeal after that moment.
In 1976, there was also a sighting of a UFO in Morocco, although that document is also heavily redacted.
The full-page report is covered in 25 black lines that appeared to have been made directly with a pen.
In another report, CIA officials discuss the possibility that UFOs were behind a 'mysterious blast' in the small Russian town of Sasovo in 1991.
In that report, residents reported seeing a 'fiery sphere' drop from the sky before a shockwave tore through the town, leveling an entire block.
The report said investigators had failed to come to a conclusion about the cause of the explosion.
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