Take UFOs seriously

Whether you call them UFOs, UAPs or flying saucers, Canada should treat the objects that fly in our skies as scientific phenomena, not pop-cultural quackery

- Chris Rutkowski

MOST KIDS GO THROUGH a space phase. But mine kept going after I watched NASA launch its Gemini and Mercury spacecraft on TV. And it kept going after I joined my high school's UFO club in Winnipeg. When I enrolled at the University of Manitoba, I opted for a science degree; I wanted to be an astronomer. I would have been happy to spend all of my days looking up.

At the time, my professors were receiving tons of calls from civilians about UFO sightings. Convinced they were nonsense, they stopped picking up. I asked if they'd pass the calls along to me. All through my freshman year, I fielded reports from UFO spotters and sometimes even visited them at their homes. Their sightings were mostly things like stars and planes-honest mistakes. But others, like one family's tale of a "Ferris wheel of lights," didn't have simple explanations. One professor asked me to give a presentation on what I'd heard. Hundreds of people packed the auditorium. I became the "UFO guy" overnight.