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In much of this book, we explore odd, eerie, and macabre things that have occurred in the shadows, on the streets, among historic landscapes, and inside buildings and homes that have stood for hundreds of years. But it’s time to now pause and take a brief look at the skies above the city.

Throughout history, and among many countries and cultures, strange and unexplained objects and lights have been spotted in the sky. The term flying saucer was first made popular in the 1940s, and a decade later, the United States Air Force coined a phrase for the phenomenon that does not imply one particular shape. And thus the term UFO, or unidentified flying object, was born. (The French version of the term is OVNI, from the French phrase objet volant non-identifié.) Although the terms UFO or flying saucer are most commonly associated with aliens or otherworldly spacecraft, the term unidentified flying object is actually used to refer to an object someone observes in which the source or origin is not known.

Montreal, like so many other locales around the world, has been visited by a variety of UFOs. A number of people have spotted strange unidentified objects that they couldn’t explain in the afternoon or night sky. A 2014 report by Geoff Dittman and Chris Rutkowski of the Canadian UFO Survey titled “25 Years of Canadian UFO Reports” lists the cities with the highest number of reported UFO cases. Montreal placed sixth on the list, with 287 sightings. The list ranked the cities in Canada in the following order: Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal. The report notes that the distribution of UFO reports isn’t directly related to the population of a city; if that were the case, Montreal, being the second largest city in Canada, would be listed second.

The report’s list of the top ten “strangest” UFO reports, cites the January 6, 1977, case of Ms. Florida Malboef, who reported seeing a saucershaped object landing on a building near her home. She said that she spotted a pair of “spindly” creatures in what looked like tight-fitting suits moving about the roof of the building before they disappeared from sight and the saucer-like object lifted off and flew away.

A 1985 Montreal Gazette article titled “UFO clerk blasé about sightings” shares the fact that one night authorities from Transport Canada at Dorval airport received three calls between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. mentioning a large white- or red-looking oval object in the skies over north Montreal. The first report came from a middle-aged woman from Mount Royal, identified as Mildred, who said she was roused from her bed when the windows began to rattle as a result of what sounded like “hundreds of firecrackers” crashing over the house.

She immediately woke her husband and they went to the bedroom window and saw a fiery red ball moving slowly and low in the sky in a northeast direction. Intrigued, she threw on her kimono and went downstairs to see if she could get a better look. “From my living room I saw the big red ball; it had a beehive effect,” Mildred told reporter Michael Farber. “It was very bright. It lit up the sky for an hour and a half. And there was a noise, like gunshots or firecrackers and static, static from hundreds of radios.”

However, a shift manager at the air traffic control centre at Dorval said there had been post-Easter Sunday fireworks celebrations in the area, which could have explained the phenomenon. The same article included a statement by a clerk at the Hertzberg Institute, the arm of the National Research Council that studies astrophysics, who said that she was unconcerned about the incident, noting that she receives and files as many as 150 reports of UFO sightings every year, and that they were just part of the regular routine for her.

In a 1978 Montreal Gazette article, Marc Leduc, a physics teacher and investigator for UFO Quebec, spoke about the popularity of a movie called Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the increased incidents of UFO sightings since its release. He predicted that 1978 would be a peak year for UFOs over Montreal. As predicted, one of the reports was even picked up by an Ohio newspaper. A Toledo Blade report from 1978 titled “2 Campers Report UFO Photographs” claims that two Canadian men photographed an unidentified glowing object that hovered over a lake in La Verendrye Park while they were camping at Lake Baskatong.

They reported that the brilliant object hurtled out of the sky and seemed to disappear, but that it later returned and hovered silently over the water of the lake for about half a minute. Their photograph revealed a blurry and grainy white oval-shaped object in the middle of an expanse of black.

But Leduc, who maintained a relatively sceptical position about the twelve hundred or so reports that UFO Quebec had received between 1961 and 1978, said that some of them might actually have some substance. “I am not a believer in UFOs,” he said. “But we are confronted with so much evidence that I must be open-minded.” Leduc, after all, had an experience of his own that he just couldn’t explain.

On August 10, 1973, Leduc was standing outside St. Bruno, which is south of Montreal, when he spotted a squadron of UFOs flashing across the sky in a northerly direction. Following up on reports from several people who had spotted objects in the sky, Leduc said that he went outside to take a look for himself. “The first thing we saw,” he said, “was a green fireball, two-thirds the apparent size of the moon. Then, they were upon us — a squadron of eight UFOs, starlike in appearance, constantly passing each other and moving silently but at tremendous speed.

“They went from the south to the north of the sky in less than five seconds — as fast as a shooting star but too long-lasting to be either a shooting star or a meteor.”

One of the most well-known documented UFO sightings, “the Place Bonaventure Incident,” occurred on November 7, 1990. A CBC Archives report by reporter Pierre Mignault for Newswatch in November 1994 detailed the events of that night. At approximately 7:20 p.m., a female tourist who was swimming in the outdoor pool on the seventeenth floor of the Place Bonaventure hotel spotted what she described as a round metallic object in the sky. The unidentifiable object was emitting a series of brilliant light beams.

She called out to the pool lifeguard, who looked out and spotted the same eerie phenomenon. Not certain what to do, the lifeguard contacted the hotel’s security guard, who was startled by the inexplicable sight and contacted both the police and a reporter from the La Presse newspaper. The reporter, Gilles Beliveau, and a police officer arrived at the same time and rode up in the same elevator to the pool, the two of them joking about the alleged incident, assuming it would turn out to be a humorous misunderstanding.

“When we arrived together on the roof,” Beliveau said, “he looked in the sky and said ‘Sacrement.’ He was astonished, like I was.” (“Sacrament” is a common French-Canadian curse that translates roughly to “goddamn.”)

The officer said, “We saw this round shape, it seemed metallic. It projected light beams. It had four series of three light beams each. It was gigantic.”

The head of the police, who was called in, arrived at about 9:00 p.m. and reached out to the local military and airports to determine if there were operations being performed in nearby airspace. They all confirmed that nothing of the sort was taking place. The RCMP and NASA were also contacted about the unexplainable sighting, which lasted for almost three full hours.

Another eyewitness, who was driving just a few miles away, said he also saw a large light-emitting object at about the same time. He described pulling off the road to get a better look and hearing a low-frequency purring-like sound as if from an engine. He described the object as remaining “very static” before suddenly gliding to another position.

A meteorologist who looked into the phenomenon concluded that the eyewitnesses must have been seeing the Northern Lights. However, a detailed report disputes this allegation. The event caught the attention of Bernard Guénette, a Montreal-based UFO researcher, who, together with Dr. Richard Haines, a former scientist from NASA, published a twenty-five-page report in 1992 about the incident. Their report concluded that evidence of the existence of an approximately 540-metre-wide, highly unusual, hovering, silent object was indisputable. “There is nothing about these particular meteorological conditions,” the report continued, “that could produce an optical effect of the kind described by these witnesses.”

The 2016 Canadian UFO survey indicates that 1,131 UFO reports were officially filed in Canada that year, above a thousand cases for the fifth year in a row. The report continues that Montreal, with seventythree reports, was the city with the most number of UFO reports for that year. It indicates that of all the reports across Canada, 74 percent of them had insufficient evidence, 1 percent of them were explainable, 4 percent of them were unexplained, and 21 percent of them were defined as “probable.”

This suggests that as many as one in every four UFO sighting reported are truly unexplained phenomenon. Whether the objects, lights, and sightings in the sky are evidence of extraterrestrial life-forms visiting earth, or they are an indication of some other yet-to-be-explained phenomenon, at least eighteen of the seventy-three reports from Montreal from 2016 appear to have enough substance to make even a skeptic look up to the skies and wonder.