A report of an unidentified light spotted by the crew of a medical transport flight in the sky over Northern Manitoba in 2019 was forwarded to an air force squadron and then on to Transport Canada, Vice World News reported in an April 12 article.
The no threat Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings (CIRVIS) report was created on Jan. 6, 2019 after the crew of a Vanguard Air Care flight saw an unidentified light moving parallel to them for about three minutes while they were travelling at about 425 kilometres per hour at an altitude of 7,500 feet around the 55th parallel. The report says the brightness of the light in the night sky was what attracted the observer’s attention and that NAV Canada’s Winnipeg Air Control Centre (ACC) assumed that it was another aircraft. 21 Aerospace Control and Warning Squadron at Canadian Forces Base North Bay in Ontario, whose mission it is to protect Canada under the term’s of the Canada-U.S. joint air defence pact known as NORAD, was notified of the sighting. An unclassified intelligence report was then faxed to Transport Canada.
A Royal Canadian Air Force spokesperson told Vice that Transport Canada is the primary investigator of CIRVIS reports. Transport Canada told them reports of unidentified object usually can’t be followed up on because they are unidentified. NAV Canada, a private company that owns and operates civilian air navigation infrastructure like air traffic control centres, told Vice it sometimes provides information on unauthorized or unknown aircraft in North American airspace to the military, NORAD and Transport Canada.
Winnipeg-based UFO researcher Chris Rutowski told Vice that there are only a handful of CIRVIS reports filed every year but they do show that pilots sometimes se unidentified objects in North American airspace. The fact that they get passed on to Transport Canada as unclassified documents suggest that they are not regarded as security or defence issues, said Rutkowski, who has collected information on over 22,000 UFO sightings from the last three decades and has used information from CIRVIS reports in his annual Canadian UFO Survey.
