Mysterious & Curious (Vol. 3) – UFO sightings across B.C.
British Columbia has long been a place of mystery — a province where thick forests swallow sound, mountains breathe fog, and shorelines stretch into shadows. It’s a land that seems to hide things, but every so often, something reveals itself.
Not beneath the ground like a boot full of gold or deep in the sea like a serpent’s ripple — but high above, in the sky.
UFOs. UAPs. Call them what you want. The skies over B.C. have hosted strange visitors for decades. Lights that move against the wind. Craft that vanish in the blink of an eye. Metallic shapes hanging motionless, then gone. Some have been chased by planes. Some have been tracked on radar. Most? Never explained.
And it’s not just one corner of B.C. From the beaches of Tofino to the lakes of Kelowna, from isolated northern towns to the downtown Vancouver skyline — people have looked up and seen something they can’t forget.
We’ve combed through declassified documents, dusty case files, media reports, and online witness testimony to bring you some of the most compelling unexplained aerial events in B.C. history.
Squamish UFO
This is Mysterious and Curious, Vol. 3 — They Came from the Coast: UFO Sightings Across British Columbia.
In 1960, a man stood on the rocky shore near Port Hardy and watched a red-orange orb zigzag silently over the water. It moved too fast for a plane, too smooth for a meteor. There was no sound. No trail. Just the water reflecting light as it passed — and then, nothing. His report, along with dozens of others, landed in the archives of the National Research Council (NRC), which collected Canadian UFO reports until the 1990s. Their archives are now publicly available.
Vancouver Island, it turns out, has always been a bit of a hotspot.
Fishermen off the coast of Ucluelet have reported glowing discs rising from the water. Hikers near Mount Washington have seen lights floating between trees. In 1974, a Campbell River logger described a silent “upside-down bowl” hovering above a clearcut. It pulsed with red light before shooting straight into the clouds. “I know what helicopters sound like,” he said. “This wasn’t anything close.”
Meanwhile, up north, things were getting even weirder.
In December 1996, a string of witnesses in the Yukon reported seeing an enormous, silent craft glide across the sky. It was described as the size of a football field. Some saw it from Atlin, near the B.C. border. Others further south in Dease Lake described “a metallic diamond” that blocked out the stars. While the event is officially categorized as the 1996 Yukon UFO, B.C. witnesses were part of the phenomenon. The case remains one of Canada’s most well-documented multiple-witness events, with detailed interviews archived by researchers.
In the Okanagan, Kelowna has quietly become one of B.C.’s most active UFO report hubs.
In 2003, a woman walking her dog near Knox Mountain reported a silent triangular craft drifting overhead. It had three white lights, one on each corner, and a red blinking light in the center. She stopped. Her dog whimpered. Then it disappeared behind the trees — not flying, but blinking out. She filed her report with MUFON Canada.
Throughout the early 2000s, dozens of similar sightings trickled out of Vernon, Penticton, and Lake Country. A schoolteacher reported a “silver cigar” over the water. A vineyard worker claimed he was followed down a farm road by a hovering light. RCMP reportedly received multiple calls over the years, though most files remain closed to the public.
Vancouver, too, has had its share of aerial anomalies.
In 2011, several people walking the Seawall near Stanley Park reported a glowing orb hanging in the sky. Videos appeared online, with commenters debating whether it was a drone, lantern, or something stranger. A retired pilot weighed in: “Too still. Too bright. No nav lights. Not a plane.”
Around the same time, a Vancouver International Airport employee anonymously shared a story about an object entering restricted airspace. “It moved in from the west, fast and low. The tower saw it. Then it was gone. The military didn’t comment.”
To the east, in Squamish, locals have whispered about strange objects moving between the peaks for years. One hiker claimed to see a “dark glassy saucer” skimming the treetops above Stawamus Chief. Another described lights that seemed to play among the clouds during a lightning storm, “like they were watching.”
Further down the coast, the Gulf Islands have their own stories to tell. On Salt Spring Island, a farmer described seeing a glowing blue sphere float silently across his field in 1997. It passed between trees without disturbing a single leaf. On Pender Island, a group of campers saw what they thought was a shooting star — until it stopped, reversed direction, and shot straight up into the sky. “It felt like we were being scanned,” one witness wrote in an online forum.
Gabriola Island has a lesser-known history of aerial anomalies as well. Local lore speaks of strange lights over the water that seem to hover, then dip below the waves. Some blame fishing boats. Others aren’t so sure.
In the Kootenays, residents of Nelson and Kaslo have their own tales. In 2005, a couple camping near Ainsworth Hot Springs reported being woken up by a pulsing light outside their tent. When they stepped out, the light rose slowly into the air and vanished without a sound. Days later, they discovered burn marks in the grass where it had hovered.
An even earlier report from Kaslo, in 1989, described a white orb that followed two hikers along a remote trail for over half an hour. They filmed part of it on an old camcorder, but the footage was inconclusive. One of them later said, “It didn’t feel like a machine. It felt like something alive.”
Some of B.C.’s most intriguing UFO stories come not from the sky, but from memory. Or perhaps something deeper.
In Haida Gwaii, stories of sky beings and visitors from the stars predate colonization. The Sts’ailes people, whose traditional territory spans the Fraser Valley, have passed down stories of Sasq’ets — not just the forest guardian known as Sasquatch, but of star people, sky beings, and ancestral visitors. The same stories, in different forms, appear across Coast Salish, Nlaka’pamux, and Okanagan oral traditions.
While these are sacred stories, not alien narratives, some suggest that there’s a connective thread — that what we now call UFOs may echo older understandings of the world beyond.
Today, the sightings haven’t stopped. If anything, they’ve increased.
Reports from 2020 to 2024 show a steady stream of sightings in B.C., from TikTok videos of orbs over Kamloops to Reddit threads detailing close encounters on logging roads outside Terrace. The digital age hasn’t solved the mystery. It just made it more visible.
Even as drone footage and satellite tracking become more accessible, the question remains: what are we seeing? Atmospheric tricks? Secret tech? Something else entirely?
The most compelling thing about the UFO phenomenon in British Columbia isn’t just the lights, or the speed, or the silence — it’s the consistency. The same descriptions, the same behaviors, the same unanswered questions, repeating across decades and regions.
Maybe it’s the mountains. The water. The energy in the land. Or maybe B.C. is just the kind of place where, if something wanted to hide, it could.
But every once in a while, someone looks up.
And they see it.
If you’ve seen something in the skies over B.C. — something that left you curious, breathless, or questioning — we’d love to hear your story. [email protected]
B.C. artist Patrick Bélanger designed coin for Royal Canadian Mint depicting the 1970 ‘Duncan Incident’
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