Have you ever looked at the night sky and saw a coloured light that travelled too fast for a moving plane? Or maybe a couple odd shapes flashing different coloured lights? You wouldn’t be the only one.
Thursday marks a quirky holiday known as National Alien Abduction Day – but how likely is it that it could happen to you or someone you know?
Albertans are the second most likely province or territory to be most likely abducted by aliens, according to data from Casino.ca.
This translates to one in 700 Albertans reporting a sighting of an unidentified flying object (UFO), according to the National UFO Reporting Center. Ontario is at the top of the list to be most likely to be abducted, with one in 667 sightings.
The province/territory least likely to be abducted by aliens is Newfoundland and Labrador with one UFO sighting for every 8,962 people.
While Ontario ranks the highest, Alberta is no stranger to welcoming out-of-this-world life forms. The world’s first UFO Landing Pad was opened in 1967 in the town of St. Paul, almost 200 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
It was built as part of Canada’s centennial celebrations. The landing pad is located next to the tourism information centre, which has record sightings dating back to the 90s.
“All visitors from earth or otherwise are welcome to this territory and to the town of St. Paul,” a plaque on the landpad reads.
There have been 729 reported sightings in Alberta dating back to 1930 with five so far in 2025, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.
The most recent sighting was reported in Strathmore, about 50 kilometres east of Calgary, in February.
“Off the side of the road about 40 feet up, a small white oval aerial craft flashed, zoomed down 2 feet with a neon green trail,” the entry said.
An entry last December in Edmonton says, “While I was taking pictures on my balcony, two disks floated across the sky without noise, they were in sync.”
“I saw a rectangular craft emerge in the sky, descend and vanish like a train entering a tunnel,” a reported entry from Calgary last November said.
The Town of Vulcan, located nearly 130 kilometres south of Calgary, is another Alberta town showing its love for life beyond Earth.
The town embraces its namesake with a Star Trek station that has floor-to-ceiling type space murals to feel like you’ve stepped into outer space. Vulcans are a fictional type of extraterrestrial in the Star Trek franchise.
The town of just under 2,000 people have worked hard to take advantage of its name by holding a close identity to Star Trek, its tourism website said.
Do aliens exist?
It’s the question many people want to know and something Sarah Rugheimer, astrobiologist professor at York University and author of “Searching for Extraterrestrial Life,” researches.
Astrobiology is the study of the origin of life on Earth and the pursuit of detecting life on other planets/moons in the Universe. Rugheimer says the short answer of that complicated question is there’s no data to prove it.
“We’ve not found evidence of microbial life on another planet. We’ve not found signs of intelligent life on another planet. The only life we know, simple or complex, is on Earth.” Rugheimer told CTV New Edmonton.
With billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, and many of them being habitable, Rugheimer said she would be surprised if there wasn’t life out there, but it just hasn’t been proved yet.
NASA’s James Webb telescope is the most powerful telescope ever built and has the ability to search for stars and galaxies, even capturing images of giant gas planets. But even with this advanced technology, it’s still not enough to detect intelligent life.
“It’s the equivalent of trying to find a firefly crossing in front of a spotlight - but imagine that spotlights in Europe, and we’re observing from Canada, and now imagine that that is 100 times further away,” Rugheimer said.
Rugheimer says people underestimate how difficult it is to find signs of life on another planet.
Even if there was intelligent life out there, what many people picture as extraterrestrial life or aliens, there isn’t a way to communicate with them, she adds.
To compare, Rugheimer uses the example of great apes and how humans share 99.5 per cent of our DNA with them, yet we can’t fully communicate with them or explain certain things.
“What if something is just that much ahead of us? Would they be able to talk to us? Probably not,” Rugheimer added.
The likelihood of any intelligent life being able to talk to humans is too rare, she said.
Canadian research on UFO sightings
The acronym UFO was commonly used in the past with unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon, or UAP, now being the more common and most used term for scientists, according to the Canadian government.
In 2022, the Sky Canada Project was launched and is being led by the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada.
The project was created to investigate how UAP/UFO sightings in Canada are handled. It’s the first known Canadian government UFO research effort in nearly 30 years and a preview of its first report was published in January.
The report’s most significant recommendation is for the Canadian government to “establish a dedicated service” to manage and analyze UAP data.
A public opinion poll, conducted by Earnscliffe Strategies, found one in four Canadians, or 27 per cent, have personally witnessed a UFO. But only 10 per cent reported their sightings.
Transport Canada should encourage pilots, cabin crews and traffic controllers to report UAP sightings without the fear of being stigmatized, the report said. The full report was released this month.
Did you really witness a UFO?
There’s many objects in the sky that you might mistake for a UFO: balloons, satellites, meteors, flares, military aircrafts, planets and more.
The Sky Canada Projects says reports of UAPs aren’t further analyzed unless they’re deemed to pose “safety or security risks.”
Rugheimer says the feeling of being abducted by aliens is a “common thing” that happens with hallucinations when a person is coming out of a sleep phase.
“When someone says they’ve been abducted, they’re having a real experience. I don’t want to diminish the fact that they feel something’s happened to them,” she added.
“They definitely experienced something. I don’t think it’s aliens. We have no evidence that it’s aliens.”
The astrobiologist admits she too once saw something odd in the sky that looked like it was “moving in odd directions and at weird angles.” It later ended up being a military plane that flew over her.
If you’re unsure if you witnessed a UFO (or maybe you wake up one morning and some of your cattle are missing) you can report it to the National UFO Reporting Center website.
Happy searching, and if you ever do encounter an alien, you can always try to greet them in Vulcan with, “Live long and prosper!”
With files from CTVNews.ca
