By Rutkows
Ufology Research Canada
Well, we're in the process of compiling and crunching the stats for Canadian UFO reports in 2011. Initially, as I had posted some months ago, it didn't look like we were going to have a high year for UFO reports, since we had barely received 500 cases by mid-October or so.
However, as has been the case in several previous years, case reports were delayed in being received and recorded by the various sources from which we obtain case data. So, the result was that although by the end of December we hadn't come close to a record number of cases in a year, by the time we tracked down all the available data, the number is much higher.
In fact, while I don't think we have reached a new record number of UFO reports in a single year, we'll be right up there... likely among the highest number of cases in a single year since the annual studies were begun in 1989. This isn't in any way a validation of the claims that "sightings are way up" that have been tweeted about and heralded to news media by some UFO groups. But if the numbers are up there, it does show that sightings have maintained a high level for several years in a row.
How many of those will be labelled "unknown" this year? How many will be "high quality unknowns" (cases without simple explanations that have been investigated and analyzed in some detail)?
We'll just have to wait and see,
In 2008, the last year for which we had reliable data, there was a record high of 1004 UFO reports in Canada in a single year. We are going back through 2009 and 2010 data so that we can get a good idea of how the past four years compare with one another.
