
Northern Lights: The Canadian UFO Experience
Canada's UFO sightings take center stage here, framed against 1967, the year the country hosted Expo and presented itself as a modern, forward-looking nation even as reports of unexplained objects in its skies multiplied. The film traces the phenomenon's origin back to 1947, when pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold spotted a formation of flat, disc-like objects over Washington State moving at an estimated 2,000 miles per hour, a three-minute sighting that coined the term "flying saucer" and set the template for every Canadian report that followed. From there the film moves through decades of domestic cases, folklore about lights and figures descending from the sky, and the government and media response to a question that would not go away. It treats the sightings as a genuine historical thread running alongside Canada's centennial optimism, rather than as isolated oddities, asking what it meant for a country selling itself as rational and modern to also be fielding UFO reports. The Arnold case anchors the whole narrative as the moment the modern UFO era began.