UFOlogy’s untapped resource is in CanadaWritten By: Elliott Van Dusen |
By: Elliott Van Dusen, Director of Paranormal Phenomena Research & Investigation.
When you hear the word Canada, you don’t normally associate it with UFOs. Canada is more known for its ghost stories and folklore. However many UFO investigators and UFOlogists do not realize how significant Canada’s role in UFOlogy could be. Canada is like an untapped resource in UFOlogy more so than any other country in the world. This can be credited to Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
There is no other police force in the world like the RCMP. The RCMP is unique because it is Canada’s national, federal, provincial and municipal police force. They are also unique because they are forced to presume the role of a government UFO investigator from time to time.
When a citizen reports a UFO sighting to the RCMP, its officers fill out a UFO sighting form. This form is listed as Form 400. An officer will either be dispatched to the location of the sighting to investigate, or they will take statements from the witnesses of a UFO sighting and eventually file the UFO report at the Detachment. Initially the reports are stored at the local RCMP Detachment. After a period of time, the RCMP files are transferred to RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario. These files will spend another period of time in the RCMP’s possession before eventually being sent to the National Archives of Canada where they will either be destroyed or preserved on microfilm and then archived.
The RCMP officer also makes a good UFO investigator. As UFO investigator Chris Styles once told me, they are a disinterested third party investigator. This couldn’t be more true. The RCMP are trained to be police officers not UFO investigators. They are trained in law, community policing, driving, police transport, firearms, self-defence, tactical training, law enforcement and public security. When an officer has to investigate such a complaint, they do so in an objective manner. RCMP officers are not debunkers of UFOs either. Some officers are able to determine the cause of the sighting through good investigation skills. They can determine whether it was astronomical, material, immaterial, physiological or psychological. However, there are times where the officer has investigated a UFO sighting thoroughly and are still unable to come to a conclusion as to what the sighting was. The officer will usually state in their report that it is still classified as an Unidentified Flying Object and that the sighting remains unexplained.
Canada doesn’t have as much of a problem with the press blackout often seen in UFO documents released by the U.S. Government and that is another reason why Canada is a good resource for UFO files. Due to the new privacy act laws in Canada, the complainant’s name can not be released in currently requested documents but the investigating officer, date, time and location are still available. The United States government is notorious for releasing pages of blacked out UFO files to researchers and investigators.
UFO documents are important to researchers, investigators and the general public because they contribute to the general understanding of the UFO phenomena. Government documents are even more important because they are not contaminated by armature hobbyists and prevaricators that have already caused so much misinformation in the field of UFOlogy. The Canadian government should be accredited for releasing UFO documents that have not been expunged to death like the U.S. Government’s documents. A witness’s name being withheld is understandable. Most UFO investigation organizations believe in confidentially anyway. However removing events, operations and information relating to the UFO phenomena and UFO sightings is wrong. No person, government, organization or agency should have the right to withhold information that could aid researchers and mankind in general in the understanding of the UFO phenomena.