Where Are The Ufos

As most readers of this blog will know, there were more reports of UFOs in 2008 than any other year on record. And I should know; Gf Dittman and I just completed our 20-year longitudinal study of UFO reports in Canada. We catalogued more than 8,500 sighting reports between 1989 and 2008, and there were more than 1,000 cases in Canada in 2008.

But so far this year, in 2009, UFO reports are way down in Canada. In fact, as far as I can tell, we are on track to get only about half as many cases as in 2008. I've looked at all the sources of UFO reports we've been using, and all are down. I even remarked to a colleague at Canadian Defence that the number of cases they've been passing on to me is down from 2008.

I've checked Peter Davenport's site (National UFO Reporting Center) and his numbers during the first quarter of 2009 are about even with that of 2008, taking into account reports from around the world. So, it's just a Canadian effect, as far as I can tell. Why this is so is anyone's guess.

It may be too early to really say if the number of reports will remain low this year. Some years, we get a surge late in the year, and sometimes many cases are reported long after the fact, so we still might end up with a respectable number of reports for 2009. There's a reason we wait until well into the following year to issue our annual study; it often takes months for the past year's reports to get collected or passed along to us.

And yet-it's too quiet...