Canadian Military Attended Recent Five Eyes Forum on UFOs, Say Feds

The Pentagon building in Washington on Dec. 26, 2011. AFP via Getty Images

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) says that members of its military attended a recent Five Eyes forum headed by the Pentagon’s director of its UFO research program focused on the issue of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP).

The Department of National Defence (DND) told The Epoch Times by email on June 7 that the meeting, which took place in May, was “informal.” The department did not specify which members of the Canadian military attended.

A DND spokesperson said that Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the U.S. Department of Defence’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), gave a presentation on UAPs at the meeting with Canada and its Five Eyes allies.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the U.S. are all members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, formed during the Second World War.

“Our nation’s militaries routinely exchange information on a number of subjects as part of our long-standing cooperation as partners in defence,” DND said in its statement.

The department added that while the meeting’s details “remain classified,” the forum could be “characterized as the sharing of information on the subject of UAP.”

“No further details can be shared at this time,” said the DND spokesperson. “This sharing of information is an example of the ongoing important relationship between our militaries.”

Briefings

In 2021, Canada’s then-Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan received a briefing on UFOs from his department in anticipation of the U.S. intelligence community releasing a report on the topic, according to documents obtained in May 2022 by CTV News through an access to information request.

The briefing, which consisted of a PowerPoint presentation titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP): Brief to MND,” said at the time there were “approximately 1,000 UFO sightings reported in Canada each year.”

The presentation gave two examples of sightings that were recent at the time, including one from May 9, 2021, in which a Delta Air Lines Boeing 737-900 cruising at 39,000 feet questioned air-traffic controllers about “traffic well above them moving right to left.”

The U.S. Department of Defence’s AARO is a relatively new project, having only been established in the summer of 2022.

The AARO’s mission is to “synchronize efforts” across U.S. federal departments and agencies in order to “detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and, as necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security.”

These potential “objects of interest” could include “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.”

Noé Chartier contributed to this report.