Somewhere in the Skies - The Canadian UAP Report Released (w/ Chris Rutkowski)

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

On episode 392, we are joined by preeminent Canadian UFO researcher, Chris Rutkowski, to discuss his involvement with the recent release of the first Canadian UAP report in over 40 years! On January 15th, the Office of the Chief Science Advisor for Canada (OCSA) published its first report on the Sky Canada Project, a study launched in 2022, which aimed to analyze and understand how UAP reports from the public are managed in Canada and recommendations for improvements. With another detailed part of the report dropping later this year, Rutkowski breaks down this initial report with us and gives us his insiders perspective on what to expect with the second part later this year. He then gives us his thoughts on the latest UFO whistleblowers and the secret meeting that took place between Canadian MP, Larry Maguire, and David Grusch. Read the Canadian UAP Report: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/science/en/office-chief-science-advisor/sky-canada-project/preview-sky-canada-report-ocsa Follow Chris Rutkowski's blog: https://uforum.blogspot.com/ Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/Sprague51/ Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Produced by LIONSGATE Copyright © 2024 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. What's up, humans? This is Babel from Sikw Activo podcast, and you are now Somewhere in the Skies. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan's bread. Welcome, everyone, to Somewhere in the Skies. Welcome to our return guest, Chris Rakowski.

And the reason, Chris, we're having you on today is because the Canadian government just released their first UFO report in decades. And one of the many decades, I know. And one of the contributors was you, yourself. You contributed to this report. Now, I want to get your thoughts on if this is an actual report or not or the lead up to a quote unquote, official report. But first of all, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. It's great to be on with you again. Yes. And we're doing this sort of short notice because the story just kind of broke. And, you know, our mutual colleague, Daniel Otis over there in Canada, reported on this.

You've been quoted in several articles lately about this story. But I thought, why not get the man on himself and let's kind of break down this report. So I guess for our viewers and listeners who may not be aware of what's going on in Canada with the Sky Canada project and all of this, maybe give us a little, I guess, introduction to what is going on over in Canada with UFOs and what exactly is this report that dropped? Well, actually, all those questions were what this report was designed to do. what is actually going on in Canada. And although there have been some UFO pundits and so-called experts who've been saying, oh, yeah, Canada has a UFO report.

We're going to find out everything that's going on. And there's going to be some great cases and its disclosure and all this sort of stuff. It ain't. In fact, there was actually a disclaimer on the web page of this Sky Canada project, which stated very explicitly, is not intended to discuss firsthand data or cases or anything. like that or to collect cases of UAP or UFOs. The idea, this was actually supposed to be an exploratory study to find out what is currently being done at the government level regarding UAP and to suggest what, you know, how this should work.

Now, the office that produced this, it's kind of a mouthful. it's the office of the chief science advisor in Canada. So this is actually an interesting position because the person in charge, Mona Nemer, Dr. Mona Nemer, she's actually a heart specialist, cardiac researcher, and she's sort of the head scientist in Canada. and she reports directly to Prime Minister Trudeau, advise on science, and also jointly to the Minister in charge of Innovation Science and Technology. And there's a long list there.

And part of the mandate was to be responsive to what Canadians want to do about science and some of the concerns. So her office has done studies on microplastics in the environment. and space astrophysics and polar research and Arctic research and all that sort of stuff and citizen science also like how to get people more involved and she was involved in COVID research and all this sort of stuff so it's it's a very broad mandate and back in about 2022 she was sitting in a meeting and she was asked you know can we do something about UAP because people are interested in the subject and the United States is doing stuff

with this ARO and you know we want to be able to respond in kind as Canadians so they sat down and they formulated this what was called the Sky Canada project and the idea was to find out you know what has been done at various departments like are there were in their you know departments within Canadian institutions like Transport Canada which is the equivalent of the FAA the states and of course the RCMP and national defense and a few other departments that had been involved were collecting or people were reporting UFOs and it all seemed to be sort of haphazard and that was what they really wanted to find out like is can we do something from a scientific

standpoint and actually the idea was that we you know we want to do something from a scientific perspective. So let's do it right. Let's find out what's going on. Let's formulate, let's find out where the problems are and then come up with some recommendations and where to go from here. They're kind of creating the Condon report, I suppose, which is the, you know, the scientific study from the 60s. But they wanted to do it right, rather than just sort of say, we're going to collect all this stuff. Let's collect data in a, you know, a reasonable manner. Let's have good methodology. Let's have scientists on board. Let's have the public on board. Let's communicate the information.

Let's be transparent. And they, you know, this is what this report is. And the report that was released on January 15th is actually called the preview report because what they were going to do was, you know, send out something by, you know, the summer to fall of 2024 and it got delayed for whatever reasons. They were still collecting information and got further and further delayed. The last I had heard was that it was going to be released in December. And then they said, well, maybe not quite December.

And then they said they were going to release it in two parts, very similar to what AARO was doing theoretically, issue a report and then a historical study, which we still haven't seen. And this is the first part of the Sky Canada project study. And it's not the whole report. All it is is sort of an executive summary, a message from, Dr. Mona Nemmer and a list of people who contributed of some recommendations and then a survey. They'd actually surveyed the Canadian population about what they thought about UFO. So it's not the whole report. In fact, the whole report is going to be much longer and will

include, I think, what all the contributors actually contributed. So there's more to come. But this was not a study to say, here are the Canadian UFO reports and, you know, the best ones are here, here, and here. And, you know, they're all purple and green and tick-tac-shaped and all that sort of. That's not what this was going to do at all. In fact, this is laying the foundation for a study to figure all of that stuff out so that we can have. And some of the recommendations we can talk about, they want to come up with an office to receive UFO reports nationally, which, you know, that's fantastic. You know, the United States doesn't have that. France certainly has one of those in Guypan, Sobeps, in Belgium and so forth, but nothing in the United States.

But this, you know, they wanted to do something well in Canada. And also they wanted to have some analysis that can be done and then have a way of telling people, you know, these are what the cases are. So be very, very transparent. So it's a very ambitious project. And this is just a little, I suppose, a teaser trailer for what's going to be. coming up. Interesting. And again, I think the key words here are science, I think, and transparency, which is exciting to learn. So yeah, like you mentioned, while we might not have gotten specific cases in this precursor to the actual report, I think it's good to know, all right, this is the

route we're taking. This is what you can expect. Like, don't think we're, you know, Canada is going to be the bearers of all UFO truth. They might be, you guys might do it. Who knows? Yeah, maybe. But I think this is very responsible. And I'm glad. I'm glad to know that things are still moving with all of this.

Two questions for you, Chris, before we get into kind of, I guess, the nitty-gritty of what this, some of these charts and graphs in the survey. One, do you think because of what's going on? over in Canada right now with Trudeau and the transitioning, the power eventually and everything. Will that affect any of this moving forward in your opinion? And second question, what was your involvement with this? And is there anything you could like tell us or tease about what you contributed to the upcoming report, whenever that might be? Yeah. Yeah, I think the second part is probably March, but that's my guess. That's my guess.

Well, yeah, you know, does the current political chaos in Canada, you know, have some bearing on what's going to happen? Well, probably, I mean, the Office of Canada's top science advisor is going to continue to exist, regardless of who the prime minister is. But the funding, you know, is largely dependent on whatever the next parliament and the committees are going to decide. So, you know, there is some possibility that it won't move forward. That, you know, that's a realistic possibility. Here's the recommendations. Well, we don't have any money so much. So that's a possibility.

It depends on, you know, who the next prime minister of Canada is. There is a, you know, a hopeful, you know, idea that the recommendations and the findings in the survey, for example, that the Sky Canada found. One of the little things, the tidbits they found was that the Canadian public overwhelmingly wants to see the government do something about UAP, and there should be an office or something to study, and there should be funding for UAP. And this was borne out through this survey, you know, in a fairly significant, like, you know, 60, 70%, something like that. So the public wants to know, and it depends on whether, you know, the new government, you know, is going to listen to this. One of the interesting things right now is that, of course, with the United States situation and the concern about the border and security and all this sort of stuff, the defense aspect might be the way that this thing might move forward, because one of the things that,

that was born out was that the Canadian public does see a need for concern about safety in the air. So passengers need to know that they're going to be flying safe skies. And security is going to be a big part of this. And one would think that, you know, UAP, if we're going to be reflecting what's going on in the United States, if there's a concern that UAP are some sort of defensive issue or, you know, safety or peace issue, issue, then maybe Canada can contribute. We do know that Canada has bought a fleet of drones for use by the military for a number of issues. A lot of border security and those aren't going to be flying for another year or so. But the news yesterday was that they've just ordered some

helicopters, Black Hawk helicopters to work on border security. And so if we process from the security aspect and drones and things flying over the Canadian Arctic and so forth, that maybe in that way you can sneak the UAP stuff in the back door and maybe we'll get this going for sure. Yeah. I mean, that always seems to be the way, right? Like whatever happens in the U.S. in terms of defense, you know, Canada is always there to be like, okay, we want to get a little bit in on this, especially with the drone invasion

of New Jersey. happened over in the UK. Like, who knows? Maybe Canada might be next and have this whole drone wave thing. Oh, we've had that. We've had it already, Ryan. You've had it. That's true.

I've been posting stuff about drones in Canada. In fact, Pierre Davenfort, Newfork, he included Canadian cases in his review of the drone, New Jersey situation. So, I mean, it's happening in Canada. It's happening all over the place. But it's interesting. mentioned you know Canada's going to sort of go along with the United States that's that's true to a certain extent that you know it's you know it's the big brother or big sister you know looking looking after the the the poor northern people however it's interesting

that you may have seen this photo of the balloon or whatever it was that was shot down over the Yukon yes and just a little round thing you know with a notch taken out of it well that photo was released through the equivalent of the Canadian Freedom of Information Act requests, ATIs, and it was obtained through Canadian document researchers. In addition to the photo, more than 500 pages of documentation about the shooting down of this were obtained, including the briefing for the Canadian Prime Minister about the shooting down of these things. things. And so we have lots of information that a lot of UFO and UAP fans have, you know, glommed onto, not a single document from the United States has been released.

I was just going to say, Chris, that's 500 more pages than what Biden released. It's amazing. And so, you know, Canada has always done this that we've had, you know, I'd say we're more transparent. Canada in general has been working in a different way. certainly in my research, I mean, I have National Defense, UAP, and UFO reports from 1947 to the present without an interruption, which is you don't have that in the United States. I mean, after Blue Book, we really don't know anything that happened up until, you know, 2015 when the New York Times came up with its thing with Leslie Keene and so forth,

about the project that was in 2007 or, you know, 12 or whatever, you know. And but we don't know cases. Even now with AARO, they release generalizations about, you know, the typical cases of a ball. And it's about this height above the ground and so forth. We don't actually know the individual cases, which we do have in Canada. In fact, we have American cases in the Canadian files. So, you know, Canada is operating in a different way. way. And I think this particular project, the Sky Canada project, is a good indication that if

something's going to be done, it's going to be done right. I mean, we really don't know how AAR is going to operate, but we do know how Sky Canada's envisioning how it's going to operate. Right. Right. And again, I think that's great, that they're like, you know, let's not get ahead of ourselves here, where I think Arrow was kind of caught red-handed, um, uh, dropping the ball on things, hiding things. We still don't know how much money that American taxpayers are contributing to Arrow. It's, we could talk forever about that. I guess before we get to the survey itself, because I do find that pretty fascinating, especially since, you know, I've basically been in honorary Canadian in these past two years. Absolutely. Yeah.

I've been in Canada more than I've been in America or the UK. What was your contribution to this report? If you don't mind sharing anything you can with us. Well, sure. I mean, they reached out to me. In fact, I was surprised they didn't reach out to me earlier because I did hear that some people had contacted them and they had contacted others ahead of time.

They didn't reach out to me. I'm thinking until... oh maybe February of last year, 2024. And they sort of said, well, we wanted to find out, you know, what everybody else was thinking, but we wanted to go to you because you're the one who's actually been, you know, looking into this stuff the longest and has the most experience. So, and I did meet with them. By them, I mean the team of researchers in Ottawa.

And it's an interesting team too, because, because they're all scientists. I think, well, there's one astrophysicist. There's one on the team who's the head of the Montreal Skeptic Society, I think, or something like that. Okay. Sounds like a hockey team. Huff nut the crack, yeah.

And the rest have no experience. Like they're, you know, I mentioned, you know, NEMR's a cardiologist. There's a chemist, there's an anthropologist. There's one geologist who also contributed. But the thing is, these are all scientists, and they really have no experience. They were completely blown away by the interest. In fact, there's a note in their preliminary preview report that says this was the, you know, unexpected to get such a tremendous response like this.

Nothing they've ever had has had a response like this. And I can just imagine, I heard that, you know, people were sending them thousands of pages of documentation and my visit with the Centurians and you know all this sort of stuff they were just they there was they were overwhelmed so they were glad to get some perspective and I gave them some recommendations I had actually prepared recommendations for at the request of another government office some time ago and I basically you know said edited that a little bit and gave that to them they knew all about the Canadian UFO survey They were eager to find out more detail where the cases were coming from, some of the people I was in contact with, and my impressions of what was going on in Canada or the past 40, 50 years or something like that.

So, you know, I gave them, I answered all their questions, and they were very eager. And then after that point, I was getting questions from time to time where, you know, communications about the drones recently and things like that. So, you know, they were very appreciative and they did, you know, list me among the contributors. And it was interesting to see. And the list itself is quite interesting, too. Some of the people mentioned I'm very familiar with. Vicente Guan Balester-Almos. Some of your viewers may know he's a South American euphologist.

He was one of the editors of the tremendous book, The Evaluation of Eyewitness Accounts of UFOs, a big, thick book about this big. It's a fantastic researcher. He's involved in a number of conferences, scientific conferences. Christian Page. Christian is a Quebec researcher. He's media personality.

He has probably more books out than me, all in French, I think, except for a few, for a few, but he's been on TV, lots of shows very similar to me. He's my counterpart, I suppose, in Quebec. And, you know, there's, so I'm quite familiar with some of the others. Some I didn't know, didn't recognize the names at all. I'd hate to look them up. Who are these people?

Yeah. And, of course, Daniel Lotus. You know, Daniel's been doing some interesting stuff. He's only been in the field for like five, six years or something like that. And he admitted he really hadn't paid much attention. of things before then and he's getting a lot of kudos for you know getting the uap and UFO subject into mainstream media of course I've been doing that for 40 years I've been in fact on on his network I I was somebody pointed out that I

must have about 40 or 50 interviews on his network alone since about 1990 or so so yeah I've been doing that too so he's you know he's you know taking the ball and running with that now he and you got a fair amount of uh coverage from this uh from this most recent uh thing yeah yeah and you know again like it i kind of look at it chris you know the the ufo field the ufo research field i should say um it can often feel uh competitive sometimes like if you have the scoop on something this that you know but what i do like is when journalists and researchers can work together and you know there are times where Maybe a, let's say, a military witness in the U.S. comes forward with a story.

And, you know, it then is up to the person. Like, would this be good on like my medium page? Or should I try to give this to someone at a higher level where it could reach more people? So I think, you know, when researchers are willing to do things like that or work together to find a common consensus, the case or a study. I think that's great. And it's so good to see you and Daniel's sort of working together over there on these sorts of things. Well, let's get to the survey because I did find that pretty interesting. You know, we've got charts, graphs. We will put the entire preliminary

report in our show notes so everyone can go read that if they'd like. But you kind of, you wrote a blog about sort of the highlights in your response and reactions to a lot of this. So I'll kind of to let you take it from there. I do have some of the images that I featured here. This was chart five in the report, which I found kind of fascinating that you featured on your blog. But if you want to, wherever you want to start, Chris, with the report itself. Well, sure. I think it's important to talk about the survey. Now, I've always wondered about surveys in this day and age. Because it used to be that, you know, Gallup polls were done by phoning people. Well, that doesn't work anymore. So how do you actually do this? And as I understand it from talking with some pollsters these days,

they sort of acquire a list or a group of people who have volunteered to be contacted about polls, about any subject. And so when they want to do a random survey of people, about, you know, UAP, they sort of put a notice out, would you like to be in this poll and people put up their hands and, you know, get contact. That's how I understand it. And there's actually a disclaimer in the Sky Canada project about the survey to the effect of you can't actually extrapolate these results to the general Canadian population because there were only like a little over a thousand people who are responding to the poll, and they may not represent the entire, you know, Canadian population. So I think the same thing happens in polls in the United States,

and of course we've questioned polls with regards to political results, for example. How did the polls get so wrong? Well, it could be the reason behind poll problems these days. But nevertheless, it does show that, you know, although, we can't say it's extrapolating to the general population, this probably is pretty close to how, you know, the subject is being looked at among a large portion of the population. So this chart five, you know, ask the question, what do you think is behind or the source of UAPs? Most people had no idea, which I suppose is the general population's viewpoint. But 10%, which was the, you know, if they had to give an answer, 10% of the respondents said aliens.

Now, you know, I think that reflects what, you know, a lot of people in the UFO and UIP field suspect. I think because of media influence and things you might read and see online and in social media, you know, I'd say the alien theory, a non-human intelligence and so forth, that's probably one of the main contenders. Right. and you know some of the other one you know six percent for uh foreign people uh governments and spies and you get weather and then drones actually come down to about four percent uh and military three

percent and then other and whatever that is so the the yeah the vast majority you know um you know are have no idea but if you're pushed on it i think a lot of people would say you know probably aliens something like that and it's interesting that although Sky Canada Project scientists were being very objective and they're not, you know, they're not putting their weight behind anything in particular. They have questions about alien life in the survey and they do talk about aliens and the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations in the body of the report too. And I think a lot of that is reflected from the contributions of some of the people they had contacting them as experts. I noticed that Mufon, Canada, for example, was listed as one of the, organizations that was contributing and I'm sure that the you know alien aspect was you know

probably a lot of what to Mufon Canada contributed interestingly Derek Massen who was the director of Mufon Canada at the time the survey was sorry the project was underway he resigned in actually he resigned the weekend that we were together last Ryan in October and so he hasn't actually been with Mufon for some time so you know I'm not sure whether there's a shift there or you know how it's going to be taken over and if there's a new direction from move on canada but i suspect that's the direction that that was coming from interesting okay yeah yeah it's you know say what you want about move on like they they're a pretty controversial organization to say no least that's why we go independent chris yeah let me see

what my next chart is here um okay we've got a pie chart love me a good high chart what's going on here yeah yeah you wake no sightings and reporting okay yeah the the idea they asked have you ever seen a UFO or a uap um and um this worked out to be 27 percent yes now that was actually quite surprising because there have been polls previously i mean gallop has done lagee has done decima you know roper has done some and the the percentage has always been around 10 percent In fact, my group Euphology Research conducted a poll as well of people across Canada. I had my associates in various provinces help me with this and it was, you know, stopping somebody on the street and saying, you know, have you ever seen anything?

We had a whole series of questions. And it worked out to be about 10%. And that's generally been the accepted percentage from all previous polls. And this 27% was actually very surprised. Now, why is it higher? Well, part of it is certainly because of the selectivity of the people you're asking about. No question that, you know, that's going to be part of it. But it's interesting that if you ask people, okay, you've seen something, when did you see something? 11% said within the last year. So it's very possible that when you're asking people if they've seen a UFO, you know, if they've seen something recently, they'll say yes. if they've seen something in the past that they sort of forgotten about, you know, or, you know, they thought, oh, I wonder if that was a UFO. That may not be reflected in that first question, because if you look,

more than 10 years ago gets 43%. So if you ask people, you know, if you've seen something, well, you know, more than 10 years ago, you know, back in aught nine, you know, yeah, I did see something in the sky. And so it's very possible that's why this number is a little bit conflated. Interesting. Yeah, I can't tell you what I was doing or seeing in the skies 10 years ago. I can tell you that much. Yeah, but here's the thing.

Let's even go with the 10%. In Canada, that would mean that 4 million people have seen UFOs or UAP. And in the United States, you know, roughly 10 times that number. So 40 million people have seen UFOs or UAP. That's a lot of people. And you should have put in perspective that, you know, the percentage of people who are allergic to strawberries is in the millions. But I think the number of people that have seen UFOs is greater than the number of people who are allergic to strawberries.

And yet we have laws and the United States has laws, you know, about safety. food safety and you know watch allergy prevention you have cat can't have strawberries in schools that have people who are allergic to it so forth there's preventative measures in place to protect people who have uh strawberries who have you know who have allergies to strawberries but you know why don't we have more you know legislation about people who've seen UFOs you know there's the numbers are there you know politicians take note and maybe one particular politician will be taking notes soon. I think I know who you're talking about.

Yeah, we'll get to that. We do. We need to lobby for the Strawberry UAP Act of 2025. And I have to say it for those ancient uphologists, aliens love strawberry ice cream. I don't know if you remember that show. UFO contact live or UFO something live. Yeah, yeah.

With our good aviary buddies. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, good deep cut there, Chris. Yes, for anyone watching this or listening, if you know what we're talking about, we respect you. That's for sure. Let's see what I got here next, Chris. Okay, we've got quite a few here. If there's anything you want to elaborate on here, or we could move on.

Well, I think the last one, chart 19, because we want to get to some other stuff. Sure. Half of the respondents would support the government in Canada dedicating public funds to investigate UAP. Now, that's half the percentage of that don't think is somewhat less. So more Canadians than not think that the government should allocate funds to support UAP. That's a prickly issue. You know, in this day when funds are really, really tight, healthcare, you know, border, you know, all that sort of stuff. But to say that I think the government, our government, your government should, you know, allocate funds to investigate or study UFOs and

UIP. I think that's something that the public is really interested to, you know, to know more and thinks that it's enough of an issue that we should, you know, have, you know, have more of involvement and dedicate some funds. And one of the other ones, I'm just going to have to bend in here. Yeah, a little hard to see. I apologize. No, that's okay. It's not one of these, but there's one of them that talks about, you know,

forming an agency to investigate UFOs and, you know, and, you know, that's something that is desperately needed. You know, we do need a place to report things. I mean, I actually, in one of my blog posts, I listed all the places that you can report your UFO or UAP siting to. And there's dozens that if you really wanted to report your UFO citing, there's web pages, there's agencies that you can go to. Even in Canada, there's at least a dozen places that you can report your UFOs and UAPs to. And it's all inconsistent in the way it's collected. Most organizations don't share their data.

You know, mentioned Mufon. Mufon doesn't share its case data. But a lot of organizations do share the data. And even that, in those cases, you know, we have to, you know, pull out and extract the information, you know, so it's in a consistent format. So, you know, there's, you know, some problems there, but it's something that needs to be done. and the Sky Canada project hopes to figure out a way to do that. What I found bemusing, Chris, was in your blog post, one of their suggestions was the Canadian Space Agency,

and you kind of scoffed at that. So what's going on there? Well, it is kind of interesting that the Canadian Space Agency evolved from the National Research Council's auspices. And the Canadian Space Agency, it's the body in Canada that produced the Canada arm, the thing that's on all the spacecraft and satellites and space stations in orbit and whatever. So we're going more in that direction. And back in the 60s and up until the early 90s, the National Research Council, from which the Canadian Space Agency was coming from, was designated as. the scientific agency where UFOs would be reported and it did get the UFO reports but they were

grudgingly accepted and most of the scientists you know didn't even bother with the case they didn't investigate them and a lot of them were just openly hostile and Canadian Space Agency I mean its budget is minuscule compared to NASA and you know a lot of the scientists there I mean we just saw what happened with NASA NASA NASA held its press briefing earlier this year about UAP. And they were just lamb-based and because, you know, about the quality of what they're going to do and how can they, you know,

how can they say that they haven't found evidence and all this sort of stuff? Well, the Canadian Space Agency with a fraction of the budget, certainly I don't think is any position to do that unless their budget is boosted a little bit. And even in that case, I know that I mentioned the freedom of information files that people have done in the United States to get information about UFOs and various governments.

In Canada it's the access to information program and one of the things you can do in Canada is see what other people have requested. And many people have requested UFO information from national defense, from Transport Canada, from various research institutions, atomic energy boards, and so forth. And they've found many, many pages of documentation. Again, the 500 that we got from about the Yukon thing being shut down. And the Canadian Space Agency has also been a target of people filing for information about UFOs because it's a logical place to get information on UFOs from, I suppose. And it's true. Some documents were generated from and released from the Canadian Space Agency regarding UFOs and UAP. All of them were letters and documents sent from UFO fans telling them about their contact with Zeta Reticuli creatures and, you know, communicating telepathically and all that sort of stuff.

nothing about what the Canadian Space Agency was doing. In fact, my name showed up in the list of things that Canadian Space Agency was talking about UFOs because somebody sent them some documents regarding a UFO, a Quebec UFO group that listed me amongst their consultants. And so the Canadian Space Agency itself has been not at all interested in UFOs and UFO. AP so far. See, I can't a project to say, yeah, this is, you know, a Canadian space agency will look into it. I can just imagine the discussions over coffee and around the boardroom tables.

I can, yep, I'm with you there. I would die to be a fly on the wall. Well, Chris, before we move on, there's two other sort of topics I want to touch on with you here. Some more recent, quote, unquote, revelations in the UFO field here in 2025. Man, they came out. they came out swinging in 2025 here in January with some of this stuff. But we'll talk about that.

But any last things to wrap up the preliminary report and what we can expect, you said maybe later this year? Yeah, the full report supposedly will be Marchish, perhaps earlier. I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised if it was delayed a little bit. Some of the recommendations that this guy, Canada, They want a federal agency to investigate UAP. Transport Canada, the Canadian FAA,

should encourage pilots to report UFOs. And there actually is already a directive to do that, and we do get pilot reports all the time. More intergovernment cooperation. I mean, there's all these departments that are doing things by themselves. Media relations, there should be better communication. There should be more transparency.

An advisory body should be, creative to counter misinformation. Now this is a big a big job and we'll actually have some relevance to the other topics you're going to be talking about right away. And UIP data should be accessible. So you know there's all these really great ideas. They want astronomers to be involved more about UIP, share information with AARO and so forth and encourage research. They would like to see universities and other research institutions be involved in talking about UAP. And you're seeing a little bit of that. I mean, I'm part of the Galileo project too. And there's scientific papers that are coming out of Harvard and,

you know, MIT and so forth about UAP now. So, you know, the scientific community is coming on board, you know, to a certain degree. And, you know, perhaps Canada can contribute to this as well. Interesting. Yeah, that's really exciting. I, you know, I have, I have a lot of hope moving into the mid-20205 when it comes to Sky Canada Project. So we will see, Chris, and we thank you for your contributions to that. That's for sure. I want to move to another story that is Canadian adjacent. And that is one of your members of parliament over there in Canada, Larry McGuire, who's been pretty vocal, the past. couple years on the UAP topic. A lot of UFO researchers have been like, you know, really struggling to get a hold of this guy and get whatever information they can. And then lo and behold, I think it was maybe a week or two weeks ago, a independent researcher, Steve Tay, and John Greenwald over at the Black Vault, both reported on this meeting that allegedly took place between, I think I have the image here, let me get that out.

Yeah, between Larry McGuire and our good buddy UFO, quote unquote, whistleblower David Grush over in the United States. And this took place like within, I think they said, a year prior to the congressional UFO hearing where David Grush testified. So what did you think when you learned about this? Did you have any pre-knowledge that this meeting took place? place or what do you make of this meeting? Greetings everyone, Ryan Sprague, are host of Summer in the Skies.

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a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Or by clicking the subscribe button at the of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support and keep looking up. Yeah, this took place some meeting with them with Grasch was some early 2022 and I met with Lyme McGuire early 22. I actually was asked to give him a briefing on on what Canada's been doing about UFOs. And at that time I It was well known that he had already spoken to Louis Alizondo, Hal Putoff, and some people from SCU, I think Robert Powell, people like that. So he had already been briefed a lot and had spoken with people about the UFO situation in Canada and elsewhere. And I guess most people have probably forgotten that David Grush had been involved in the UFO scene prior to that.

And there's this famous Star Trek convention in 2021 that he had attended and that he had met Elizondo and a few others at. So the story that Larry McGuire had met him about was sort of about Wilbert Smith and some of the other stories about Canadian UFO research and so forth. And it's very likely that Grush had heard about this from Elizondo and people like that. So it's not at all surprising that he had met with him. And because some of the other names in euphology had already met with Larry, it's not surprising to me that he would have met with Gresh as well. So I was particularly surprised at that. It is interesting that I guess I met with Larry sort of in the middle of all of that.

and gave him my take and this is what we've been doing, this is how Canada has been doing it. And he was much more interested in, you know, crash retrievals and, you know, some of the UAP discussions in the United States. He was already into that sort of stuff. And he continues to be. And, you know, he was one of the presenters at the assault conference, for example. It's interesting that he doesn't actually have,

He's always been interested in UFOs personally. And since then, he's sort of taken on the mantle of, you know, a Canadian politician who is, you know, really push the agenda a little bit more. He's been talking about, you know, UFOs and UIP over nuclear sites. And he actually, I actually was asked to provide some information about U.S. over Canadian nuclear sites. So, you know, there's this ongoing discussion, and it'll be interesting to see if anything further goes ahead with it. I know that Larry was, had also spoken with people from the Sky Canada project.

So we'll, you know, we'll see if it goes from there. But, you know, he's an outspoken Canadian politician. He's not even in the opposition party. So he's a member of the National Democratic Party. So he's sort of a backbencher. And with the Canadian election situation, who knows what's going to be happening in Canada next little while. But Larry has been involved and interested in the UFO question for quite some time.

And if there's anyone who's going to push the agenda in Canada, it's probably going to be him. Interesting. Yeah, I often think of him as the representative Tim Berch. of the North, maybe a little less controversial, which is always a good thing, but yeah, it is interesting. Well, you did mention, Chris, that he's interested, or he seemed interested

in crash retrieval programs and whatnot. That seems to be the talk of the town lately. I've been covering it a lot in my shows. I will be covering it in an upcoming documentary that you are featured in prominently. Hint, hint, guys.

But let's move to the sort of final segment of the interview because I want to get your thoughts on this and I admittedly Chris I don't know much about either of these individuals nor what has been brought forward it's all been dropping in the past week or so um so we will see as these things are uh I guess unraveled how much credence we can give them but these were two interesting interviews one of which has not aired yet it'll be airing um I believe it will have air when this episode comes out actually. That is with a gentleman named Jake Barber of the U.S.

Air Force. And the other gentleman, I do apologize. I don't have his name with me. Suff is to say these are two quote-unquote whistleblowers that have come forward in the past weeks to both claim that they worked on UFO crash retrieval projects. Jake Barber, if you're watching this on YouTube, is on the top left. He will be speaking to Ross Colthart on News Nation about having worked on a program, a helicopter pilot who recovered all types of downed craft. And one of those, if not many of those that he supposedly recovered, he believes were of otherworldly origin.

Now, the gentleman down on the right was on the Jesse Michaels show. I'm not too familiar with a lot of Jesse's work. But this guy says that he worked basically at like Area 51 or something adjacent to that. And that, you know, there was literally a room called other world technology. Yeah, I heard that. So again, Chris, these two gentlemen are coming forward. They're saying all the things we've always wanted to hear. And that's when I know people like you and I start to take pause.

And try to tell people step back. Let's rewind and look at this. That's my long-winded way of saying, what do you think about all of this? What should we do when the information being provided? Yeah, well, I mean, I'd say at this point, take it with a grain of salt. I haven't seen the interviews, obviously, at this point. So I don't know what's going to be presented and what's going to be shown. In terms of crash retrievals,

strict crash retrievals have been studied and investigated for many years, but in the context of terrestrial artifacts. In Canada, at the conference that we spoke at last together, I gave a presentation about objects falling in Canada and things that have been retrieved. In the 1960s, there was a huge chunk of things. of something, you know, four feet across that was found in the Canadian wilderness, and it was a chunk of a satellite that was retrieved. More recently, in 1970s, there was a Cosmos 954 crashed into Northwest Territories in Canada, which was a very, very serious nuclear accident because it was a

Russian satellite that had a nuclear device on board. And it spread radioactivity and chunks of radioactive metal and things all across the Canadian North. And it was a major effort to retrieve pieces of the crash. And there's actually a government report, two government reports, and a book all about this particular incident. And the detail at which things are examined. been studied in the attempt to retrieve all these particles and chunks.

I think the largest piece of the nuclear reactor that was found from the Russian Cosmos 954 was the size of a refrigerator. The rest were particles as small as a point of a pin. And it was a major undertaking because, you know, people were exposed, the vegetation, you know, trying to track everybody down and find out where the path was, all this sort of stuff. major retrieval. So we do have a lot of expertise with regard to retrievals of things. And there have been lots of crashes like that all around the world. So did Jake Ember or Frank Ferger's a name now? But what was his name again?

Jake Barber? Did Jake Barber? Did Jake Barber, you know, was he a member of one of those programs? In which case, either he would have been involved in retrieval. Yeah. In terms of a, you know, egg-shaped object, which is the one that most people are hearing about, sounds like Mork from Ork is his spaceship. But, you know, I know that there have been capsules that have been found that were roughly egg-shaped from various Russian missions and, you know, even American missions that were sort of waylaid. The object found at Kexburg, for example, was acorn-shaped.

So is it possible that, you know, that's what we're talking about? I don't know. And if we're talking about whistleblowers. Life experience is an excellent teacher. It's time you get the recognition you deserve for those hard-earned lessons. Purdue Global values the experience working adults bring to the table. Whether you're interested in a rapidly growing field like cybersecurity, business, nursing, or any of Purdue Global's other 170 programs,

earning the credentials you need may be faster than you think. Try our experience calculator to see if you could be eligible. for course credit and start your comeback today at peru globul.edu. The term may be misused a little bit. Karen Silkwood was a whistleblower. She blew the whistle on radioactive contamination in the United States. And when she blew the whistle on her employer, you know, carelessly handling and exposing employees to nuclear particles and materials, she produced the documentation. She had tests done on the material and produced the results.

And she suffered as a result. And I mean, they actually did things like put radioactive material inside her gloves and things like that. I mean, they were really after Karen Silkwood. That was a whistleblower. So far what we have from UAP whistleblowers is, yeah, I might have seen something, but I can't tell you what it is. And, you know, I can't tell you where I was and, you know, all that sort of thing. stuff. So if that's the quality we're going to be getting from this latest couple,

then that really doesn't prove anything. There's stories without any proof. Karen Silkwood would have proof. And that's, you know, what, you know, what the whistleblower level of quality I'm hoping to get from UAP people. Right. And, you know, I think that's what the biggest frustration was with the last U.S. congressional UAP hearing was that, you know, you. you had individuals there, even at the first one with Grush, saying, I can't talk about that. I could talk about that in what they call the skiff. Although the whole skiff dance tippy towing around that.

The frustrations by the U.S. representatives was visible on their faces. Like, then what are we doing here, guys? Like, if you're not willing to share any of that with us, like, what's the point of coming forward? You know, there are many arguments that could be made back and forth, back and forth about all of that. But I think you're right, Chris. The biggest frustration is people like these two gentlemen, they might be telling the truth. They very well could be telling the truth. It's a matter of the NHI, I guess, angle with both of them is a matter of opinion, personal opinion for both of them.

And also, you know, the term whistleblower. Again, we could argue that term till the end of time. But I think you're right. Like, okay, these two are coming forward. Step one. Step two is now to verify any information that we can about both of these individuals. Credentials is one thing because I've seen many people saying, well, their, you know, their credentials were backed up.

Great. That's, all right, step one, done. That's awesome. All right. Let's move to step two. we verify any of the information or names they bring forward, locations they bring forward, things like that. Yeah.

So, yeah, I think it's only just begun with these stories in 2025. Yeah, and credentials alone, you know, we, here's a topic we could get into for an entire show. Paul Hellyer, another Canadian who people revere as being a, you know, a politician who, you know, knew the truth about UFOs and aliens and all this sort of stuff. He had all the credentials. He was Minister of Defense. He, you know, although he himself lost his security clearance back in 1968, in 2000s, he started talking about aliens and in contact with humans and the military and so forth.

And he went on one interview talking about how aliens who were. working with the United States government at Area 51, went occasionally AWOL and walked through Las Vegas dressed in nuns habits as costumes so they wouldn't be discovered. You know, here's a guy who, you know, he had all the right creds, but man, oh man. I honor, that could be a hangover movie, Chris. They put that in the hangover franchise. But you're right.

I think Paul Hellier is a prime example. Whenever people bring that name up to me and say, hey, look, look, this guy said this. And like, yeah, that guy said that. So that's when you have to step back and really look at it. But again, like, who knows? I always try to keep an open mind because maybe some, even a small sliver of what all of these people are saying, if even a tiny part of it is true, like it would change. everything, but it's that tiny part that we can never, ever, ever verify. And that's what people

say, if one case, one UAP is discovered, that proves the whole enchilada. And I say, you know, it's good to have an open mind, Ryan, but not so open that your brains all fall out. And you have to watch where you're walking on the sidewalk because there's gray stuff all over the sidewalk. Exactly. Oh, man. We live. in the gray Chris. We live in the great. Oh, there's a great tagline. Can we patent that?

Can we copyright that one? Yeah, we're going to patent that along with UAP and whatever. Yeah, yeah, we got this, we got this man. We're going to become rich. That's the point of all of this. I have to get a hat with it on there. We live on the grade. I'll work on it.

Okay. Well, Chris, before we wrap things up, I did want to say once more, it was such a pleasure to see you in Shag Harbor. recently. It's such a pleasure and honor to feature you in my upcoming documentary. So hopefully I'll have some news on that as it unfolds. But before we go, what else are you up to in the UFO world? You're always doing something. You're always contributing to something. And you are still the number one person we go to in the entire North American continent when it comes to this topic. So yeah, Give us any information about what you got going on and where we can find everything you have to.

Well, yeah, I mean, we're already in the process of working on the 2024 Canadian UFO survey. We're still getting cases from 2024, so we really don't cut off for another month or so. So that won't come about probably until February, March into there, something like then. And in the Canadian or in the Sky Canada project, there's an allusion to the number of cases in Canada. and the number that they give is between 600 and 1,000 UFO reports every year, which comes from our Canadian UFO survey. So they were reading my stuff. And we don't have the numbers yet.

But what I can say that myself and my associate Leanne in BC is helping me enter data. And between the two of us, we're somewhere in the neighborhood of, I don't know, 600 reports for 2024. and there's probably at least two or three hundred more to enter. So we'll be, you know, we'll be a fairly significant number of UFO reports again this year. So I'm working on that. And I'm working, you know, people wouldn't be surprised to hear that I'm working on another book. It's not going to be released until 2026, according to my publisher.

And is going to be kind of, I'm going to name. names and tell all and it'll be an autobiography of my work in euphology. Oh, wow. Oh, I cannot wait for that. I cannot wait for that. What do I, what do I have to do? What scandal do I have to be a part of to get in nervous? Exactly. Oh, you're already. You have a whole chapter just just for Ryan. Oh my gosh, stop, stop. Well, Chris, thank you. It is always a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you for giving us some insight on this developing story over in Canada. I can't wait for the actual report to finally release and we'll obviously have you back on to talk all about that. And again, your contributions to that report. But yeah,

where can people find you if they want to reach out to you? Well, I'm all over social media. You follow you research on Instagram and X and on blue sky. On Facebook, I'm still an admin for your UFO updates. The original UFO updates is still alive and kicking. And also I'm on UFO's serious business. And, you know, not venturing into TikTok, it's going to be gone tomorrow anyways. That's true. But we do get reports through all social media.

And so in my blogs, I have a UFO blog and the Canadian UFO survey is online as well. So I'm all over the place. Perfect. Yeah, we'll put links in the show notes for people to reach out to you. And thank you. Thank you, Chris, for joining me once again on Summer in the Skies. And thank you for all the work that you're doing, Ryan. Great stuff. Right back at you.