Canadian MPs are urging the government to pay more attention to recent news from the United States on ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’, or UAP: a term used for what are more commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects and UFOs .
According to Conservative MP Larry Maguire and a Texas-based researcher, at least three Canadian politicians have now requested information about the UAP from former Pentagon officials.
“When you see the news coming out of the United States, you have to take it seriously,” Maguire told CTV News from his Ottawa office. “We need to have a parallel program to what the United States already has.”
On Tuesday, two senior US military officials testified at the first congressional public hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years.
“We know that members of our service have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena,” Ronald Moultrie, who oversees the Pentagon’s current UFO research office, said during the hearing. “We are open to any findings we may come across.”
Earlier this month, CTVNews.ca revealed that former Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan also received a UFO briefing ahead of the June 2021 release of an unclassified US intelligence report on UFOs. recent military sightings, which included UAPs that appeared “to maneuver sharply, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion. Military, police, and pilots have also filed reports in Canada.
“We need to identify the origins and intent of these UAPs, and that certainly can’t hurt,” Maguire said Tuesday.
Maguire’s office says it held a Feb. 16, 2021, briefing for the Manitoba MP and another Conservative parliamentarian with Luis Elizondo, a former US Army counterintelligence officer who allegedly ran a UAP research program before resigning from the Pentagon in 2017.
“Mr. Maguire is absolutely right in his concern because he knows this information is happening,” Elizondo told CTV News on Tuesday from Wyoming. “I think now is the time for us to have an open and honest dialogue. on this subject without fear of reprisal, without stigmatization or associated taboo.”
Maguire wrote a recent op-ed on the subject and even used his committee work to raise questions about UAP sightings in Canada. Earlier this year, Maguire’s office hosted another briefing with members of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), an international think tank dedicated to applying scientific methods to UAP research.
Engineer and founding SCU board member Robert Powell was part of that January 28 meeting and says he also attended an October 20, 2021 briefing for a Liberal MP.
“Both deputies were very interested in the topic,” Powell told CTVNews.ca from Austin, Texas. “The main thing I try to get across in these type of meetings is basically to give them as good of an understanding as possible of the history and current state of the UAP topic.”
According to Powell, the October 2021 UAP briefing with the Liberal MP included former Pentagon intelligence chief Christopher Mellon.
“We have no idea where they came from or what their capabilities are or what their intent is,” Mellon told CTV News in a June 2021 interview. Mellon did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Internal briefing documents obtained by CTVNews.ca indicate that the Canadian Armed Forces “generally do not investigate sightings of unexplained phenomena outside of the context of investigating potential threats or distress.”
Meanwhile in the United States, Pentagon UFO programs have operated under various acronyms for years. Questions about the national security implications of the sightings have even sparked rare cooperation between Democrats and Republicans, which was evident during Tuesday’s congressional hearing and with a late 2021 Senate initiative to create a new UAP research office.
“One of the interesting and remarkable things about the NAP study is that all I have seen in Canada and the United States is that there is no partisanship on this issue,” Powell said. “All parties seem to be interested in this topic, and it’s not a political issue.”
“If there’s one issue we can be non-partisan on in Canada, it should be this,” Maguire added.
Ontario NDP MP Matthew Green agrees, saying Canada has nothing to lose by investigating the ANP.
“If the testimony coming out of the United States gives the public some insight into how seriously they are taking it, then I think it would be wise for us to pursue the same prosecution,” Green told CTVNews.ca. Tuesday from Ottawa. “If they hold public hearings of this nature, I can only begin to imagine what they already know in private.”
With files from CTV National News field producer William Dugan
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