8. Montreal's wild UFO story

Canada's government is quiet on UFOs. No hearings. No task force. No Canadian equivalent of David Grusch. But Canadians? A completely different story.

This episode is about the grassroots conversation happening in this country — the one that doesn't make it into Question Period or government press releases, but is very much alive.

We start with the fourth PURSUE drop from the Trump administration — 40 new files including the now-viral "floating brain" video, a UAP intrusion at a nuclear weapons facility, and growing frustration in the serious UAP community that the most important files still aren't being released. Plus: Congresswoman Nancy Mace says agencies may be actively hiding files from Trump. The releases are real. But they might not be the whole picture.

Then: Chris Rutkowski — Canada's most prolific UFO researcher and director of the Canadian UFO Survey — just published a major new book this week called Canada's UFO Secrets. And his latest survey shows Canadian UFO sightings at their highest point since the COVID pandemic, with the average sighting duration jumping from 16 minutes in 2023 to 47 minutes in 2025. People are seeing more. And what they're seeing is lasting longer.

Then we get into the main story. Area 52 is a Montreal-based UAP podcast that has become one of the most listened-to in the world. Its producing partner, Luigi Vendittelli, became the youngest MUFON member on the planet at age 12 and eventually ran all UFO investigations across Canada as National Director of Investigations for MUFON Canada. In a recent episode of Area 52 — sharing it publicly for the first time — Luigi described two cases from his investigation years that he has never been able to explain. One involves photographs of a being taken by a Montreal woman on the 14th floor of her apartment building, held by a Montreal police officer for three years. The other involves a woman in rural Quebec who predicted — in front of nine witnesses including that same police officer — that a craft would fly directly over the house at exactly 11:11. It did. And what happened after that, involving a little girl named Lily and two people who had never met, is something you need to hear directly from Luigi.

This episode also features real accounts from Canadians who responded to posts about UFO sightings — a family encounter near the tallest mountain in BC's interior, an orb-like being seen in a bedroom that wasn't remembered for fifteen years, a craft that came out of the water near a naval base in Esquimalt, and a private message describing purple-red plasma propulsion unlike anything in any UFO documentary.

Canada is not silent. The people have been seeing things for years. They just haven't had anywhere to put it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to tell you about a prediction. A woman in Quebec told a group of people, nine of them actually, that at exactly 1111 that night, a craft would fly over the house. Of course, everyone thought she was crazy. They had dinner, they went outside, they were all hanging out, and at exactly 1111, something appeared out of nowhere. Not from the horizon, not approaching from a distance. It literally just appeared. It flew directly overhead. And again, there were nine witnesses. And one of them was a Montreal police officer. And that's not even the strangest part. Hey, I'm Peter from BC. This is the Canadian UFO podcast. We are eight episodes in, and today I want to talk about something a little closer to home. We've covered government files, congressional testimony, cases from 1967, what the Trump administration is releasing right now. And today we are talking about Canadians, real people, recent experiences, and a Montreal-based UFO podcast that is doing some of the most compelling work in the space. Anywhere in the world, you probably know it. Area 52, Mr. Chris, is living in Montreal. But first, I have a quick news update. Happily, there is something happening in Canada. On the UFO front, so two things happened this week that I have to mention first. The fourth pursuit drop landed on July 10th. I was actually in Calgary at the Stampede when this happened. They dropped 40 new files, 19 videos from the Pentagon, NASA, the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Energy. And the reaction from the community was honestly mixed. It has been for a while. I think everybody was excited that these drops were happening and they're very quickly realized that not that they weren't nothing, but they're not moving the needle in the way that we had hoped. So there is one video that when I saw it, I was like, oh, this is it. This is like people who are saying all we get is little blurry dots, they're gonna see this video, and they can't say that anymore because to me, somebody who has watched a ton of UFO videos in my life, this is not a little dot black dot, baby. This is not a little white dot, it's not an orb. The video that everyone is talking about is being called the floating brain. I was actually referring to it as a robot pig, but um the footage is from January 2020 over the Atlantic Ocean. It's a blob-shaped object with narrower bits dangling beneath it, kind of like you have it, looks like something you would see on Super Mario World floating through, floating through that universe. It's a very hard to describe object. Um, they released it, someone on X applied AI enhancement to the footage and it went completely viral over the weekend. So the AI version shows its shape, it's shape shift shape shifting and making a sharp high speed maneuver bes before accelerating away. So I actually didn't see that version first. I I was on the actual wardoc website. So the the footage I saw was still impressive to me because again, it felt like the most close-up video I've ever seen, and the object was so hard to describe that I'm like, this is for sure an alien. Like, what else could it possibly be if me, a human being, cannot even describe the shape? It has to be something alien. Um, but I don't know, the internet cannot agree, and I was a little disappointed as I have been after each of these drops, that my excitement um quickly fizzles over the um, you know, the week that follows because as I go on to my regular UFO news um spots, the people who've been investigating this for a long time are just not impressed. Um, and so that kind of deflates my excitement a little bit because I feel like maybe it's not as exciting as it is, or maybe I'm being too naive. But the internet couldn't agree on what what that particular video was. Skeptics say it's a deflated balloon, believers say look at the maneuver, but maybe that was AI. And honestly, the debate is exactly the problem with the whole release process. The serious UAP community is frustrated. And one prominent writer called this batch a disappointing tranche, raising more questions than answers. The debrief reported that none of the videos provide clear evidence of anything beyond balloons or sensor artifacts. That's the other thing. People are actually watching these videos and being like, no, I can tell you what this is, which is like, why are they choosing these videos that are so easily identified? Um, I don't know, but this is uh what I think matters. Um, something else that matters is Congresswoman Nancy Mace said this week that agencies may be actively hiding files from Trump. Yeah, no crap. That's what they've been doing that like for decades, and that the pursue releases are not the full picture. Yes, exactly. We know that. Some agencies are simply not complying with the declassification order. So we're in this weird place where the government is releasing things, people are getting excited, like me, for 48 hours and then disappointed. An AI enhanced version goes viral, but the real story is like they're not releasing what they should be. And again, like as somebody who's been in this community for a long time, the thing that always takes me out of it again is like you you always feel like disclosure is right around the nerve, and then it doesn't happen, and you get disillusioned, or I do, and then I move on to something else. And this felt different because the White House was releasing files, and I'm just I'm really frustrated if this is literally gonna be a nothing burger, and we actually haven't uncovered anything other than more grainy videos and maybe more mainstream attention, which is good. But if you're really looking critically, we haven't really proven anything else at all. So disclosure with a small D is still happening. Capital D disclosure, we are still waiting. So second Canadian news item, Chris Watowski, um, Canadian Canada's most prolific UFO researcher, the man who runs the Canadian UFO survey who consulted for the Sky Canada Project has just published a new book. Fantastic. I haven't read it yet, but I think it's out this week. It's called Canada's UFO Secrets: Disclosing Government Files on What is Happening in Our Skies. It covers 75 years of Canadian aerial phenomenon records, including cases that have never been publicly revealed. I'm so excited. CTV covered it six days ago, and the Canadian UFO survey, which Rodkowski's annual count of Canadian sightings showed 1,052 sightings in 2025, nearly double since 2023. And the average duration of sightings jumped from 16 minutes in 2023 to 47 minutes. Damn, I didn't realize people were when they were having sightings, they were seeing them for that long. That's crazy. Um, people are seeing more, and what they're seeing is lasting longer. Canada is not silent on UFOs, even though we're a little bit quiet. The people aren't just being listened to. The stories are there, but the government is kind of slow to catch up on what they are seeing. Which brings me to today's episode. And all season we've been asking why is Canada so quiet? And the answer I keep landing on is it depends on what you mean by Canada. If you mean the government, yes, it's quiet. There's no hearings, no task force, no Canadian grush, but if you mean Canadians, the actual people, it's a completely different story. The grassroots conversation is happening here and has been for a long time, just not officially. So I want to start with Area 52. It's a UAP podcast hosted by Chris Ramsey. Um, I didn't realize he's a Canadian based in Montreal, and it has become one of the most listened to UAP podcasts in the world, not just in Canada, in the entire world. It's a huge, huge accomplishment. Chris has interviewed Bob Lazar, Travis Walton, David Grush, Lou Elizondo, Ross Cuthart, the biggest names in the disclosure conversation have sat down with a Canadian host from Montreal. If you're not listening to Area 52, go listen to Area 52 right now. It never disappoints. But today I want to talk about a specific episode that he did recently that had me freaking out. I loved it so much. It involves a Canadian who has been in this field longer than almost anyone and who shared something publicly for the first time on the show. His name is Luigi Venditel. He's Chris Ramsey's producing partner on Area 52. He just released a documentary called S4, the Bob Lazar Story, which is fantastic. And here's what most people don't know about him. In 1987, when he was 12 or 13 years old, he became the youngest member of MUFON World. For those of you who don't know, Mufon is the Mutual UFO network. Um, it's one of the most established civilian UFO investigation organizations on the planet. He was a kid in Montreal who took a bus to Plattsburgh, New York because he couldn't find UFO material in Canada. Shocker. Um, he found a membership application, mailed it to Texas, and got a letter back saying you are officially the youngest member of MUFON in the world. So um he eventually became the national director of investigations firm Canada, um, which basically meant he was running all UAP investigations across the country from their point of view. So a Montreal Canadian running Canada's UFO investigations network, pretty cool. Um, he's been almost completely invisible in the broader UFO conversation, I guess, until this Area 52 episode. And in this episode, honey, which I really want you to listen to, Luigi shared cases from his years as an investigator. And there was one that I want to tell you. It happened in Montreal, it involved a Montreal police officer, and it changed how Luigi thinks about this whole phenomenon. So around 2010, there was a UFO sighting um near Cavendish Mall in Montreal. There were multiple witnesses, a Montreal police officer on the scene. And what Luigi didn't know was that same officer also had something else. Photos. Not a craft of a being. Not of a craft of a being. He had a picture of a being. A woman on the 14th floor of an apartment building nearby had been woken up in the middle of the night by her dog. The dog was completely frozen, standing in the hallway, ears up, paralyzed. She looked through a gap in her door frame. She saw a shadow. So she grabbed her iPhone, thank God. Um, this is 2010, so it's not as good as the cameras we have now, but she took five consecutive photos of what she later described as a three-foot-tall creature. It was skinny, big head, large dark eyes, and its arms were positioned like a prankess. The Montreal police officer had been sitting on these photos at the station for the years, and he just didn't know what to do with them. So he eventually tracked down Luigi at a McGill University talk and asked him for help. So Luigi said when he finally saw the photos, it was the biggest, oh my god, moment of his entire career. Um, I'm not gonna describe them further because you need to hear Luigi tell it himself. It's on Area 52. Go find it now, but I promise. Um, he said he was gonna be releasing the photos. I don't think he has yet, but I can't wait to see them. But this is the part of Luigi's story that I want to be careful about because it goes into territory that deserves genuine openness rather than dismissal or certainty. So through his investigation, Luigi Luigi was connected to a woman who had been having encounters non-human beings since she was a little girl. She ended up in rural Quebec. Luigi met her, brought her together with a group of people, nine of them in total, into including the Montreal police officer we just spoke about, who was from the Cavendish Mall case. And she told the group things that made most of them uncomfortable and laugh. Um, she said, amongst other things, that tonight at 1111, a craft will fly over this house. And like I said at the intro, the group had dinner. Mostly people laughed it off or forgot about it, but when they went outside at exactly 1111, something appeared out of nowhere. So not approaching from any direction, it just appeared. It was black, solid with an orange light and flew directly overhead. Nine people watched it. So Luigi has investigated UFOs his entire life and he had no explanation for this. Um, but here's what happens next that I thought was pretty crazy. First of all, I think it's important that Luigi did a really good point of saying that 99% of UFO sightings are not UFOs. There's something um explainable. So I think it's always really captivating when somebody who has that much experience with sightings experiences something that gets them excited. Because for him, I think he left Mufon because he felt like it it had become so mundane. Um, you you join Mufon because you want to see alien craft, but most of the time it's it's things you can explain. Um, so this story that's part of what really got me hooked, and the fact that there were nine people who all I don't know how close they know each other, but any siding with multiple witnesses grade. But um, the police officer that I've mentioned a few times had been trying to reach reach Luigi for weeks about a little girl on the south shore of Montreal who was, quote, not from here. The girl's name was Lily, and earlier that same day, in a private conversation, the woman had told Luigi about a baby she was shown on a ship. The woman I'm talking about is the same woman who said at 1111 they're gonna see a craft. She also said that she had seen this baby on a ship. Um, she was told the baby's name. She no, she saw a baby on the ship and she was told to name the baby. She named the baby Lily, which matches the name of the baby that the police officer was telling Luigi about, who claimed she wasn't from there. So already really wacky, I know, but stay with me. Um, the police officer didn't know that this woman had is claiming to have been on a ship and been asked to name a baby and named her Lily. Didn't know that at all. He had been reaching out to Luigi separately, but they had the same name. Two completely separate pe people. Um, but this is the other thing. The drawing matched too. So um the woman from the roof drew a picture of the child she was shown ship, and the photo the officer had of Real Girl matched. They were literally identical. And I'm not telling you what to conclude from this. I'm just telling you that Luigi, a man who spent years as national director of UFO Investigation Canada, who was trained to find the conventional explanation first, said this is the case he could never explain. Obviously, a lot of weird coincidences, if you want to say that, but really, really, really wild. So this story was so profound to him that he actually eventually stopped investigating and shifted to storytelling instead. So I want to spend a second here talking about what I want to spend a minute on what's happened on my social media since I started the show. So, because Luigi's story, um, the idea that regular Canadians are having extraordinary experiences and finding nowhere to put them. So I think Luigi was like, I don't want to investigate anymore. I want to find these people who are having the experiences and tell those stories, um, put them in documentaries like he did with Bob Lazar, which honestly I find a lot more interesting than the oh man, like how many more interviews do we need of somebody from the army or the navy saying they saw something? I love hearing um encounters of real people who were just living their lives and something um happened. So when I started the show, I went onto social media to see what was out there and I posted asking on my personal page if people believed in aliens. It was very, very simple. I just wanted to get a sense on what my personal network had to say. And I got like over a hundred comments very, very quickly, which was very exciting for me. I was happy to see that, but I wanted to read a couple comments that I got because this is a direction that I want to take the show probably in C2. So Cheryl from BC wrote, Yes, I have never seen any aliens, but my dad, brothers, and I did see UFO. It flew from outer the outer stratosphere around a mountain um that their dad was showing them at the time. Taught, um, sorry, let me start that again. I'm gonna read it from Cheryl's perspective. Okay, so my post again was Do you believe in UFOs? This is what Cheryl had to say. Yes, I have never seen any aliens, but my dad, brothers, and I did see unidentified flying objects that flew from the outer stratosphere around a mountain our dad was showing us, teaching us that every mountain river hill has an indigenous name. There were three shiny objects that flew into the blue sky, each flew around the distant mountain, the tallest mountain in the in the interior of BC. Then they hovered for a bit, two zoomed out of sight, one hovered, and then flew in a 90-degree angle, then zoomed back out into the stratosphere. So she was seven or eight old at the time. So three shiny objects flying around the tallest mountain in BC, one hovering, then a 90-degree turn, then straight back into the stratosphere. I believe Cheryl is in the Okanagan, so that's somewhere I'm really familiar with. Super cool to hear a story from that location. But she was seven or eight with her dad and brothers, learning about indigenous names of the land when they had that encounter. Super, super, super cool, especially from an indigenous um perspective, because I think we know from um indigenous cultures around the world that it's not a modern phenomenon. People have been seeing lights in the sky forever. So another comment from Faye out in Newfoundland. I did I did indeed. I so again, the question is, do you believe in aliens? And Faye had to say, I do indeed. I saw one. It was an orb like with large ebony, vertically looking eyes. I could not see a mouth, even though it felt like it was smiling as it glided across the pitch black room. It had its own glow, yet it was still very dark. As it got closer to me, it tilted its head like a dog when it is trying to understand what you're saying. The closer it got, the more I pulled the blanket above my face and head. As it floated practically above me, I shut my eyes tightly and disappeared beneath the covers. I awoke the next morning and did not remember the incident for 10 to 15 years later. So an orb-like being glowing but dark, tilting its head like it was curious about her. We've heard similar stories before, and she didn't remember it for years later. So the delayed memory that comes up a lot with um encounters. Luigi talked about it. David Jacobs studied it for decades. It's not something people make up, it's something that I think your brain maybe blocks out already process. Here is another comment from Josh from Esquamo, BC. I saw a UFO come out of the water near Naden Base in Esquamut. In Esquam Esquimalt. Oh my god, you know what I mean? With a friend, like the size of a bus. And after about 10 minutes of hovering in the air, it shot straight into space faster than my brain could even register. That had I love that one. I actually took the conversation, Josh, to the DMs because I thought it was so cool and I wanted more details. But out of the water, near a naval base, the size of a bus, hovered for 10 minutes, then it was gone. Now, near a naval base, that's very interesting. We we've we hear that all the time. And basically, that was Shag Harbor, one of the stories we covered, and it's still happening in 2026, all across the country. So then I got this. This is another message I got. It wasn't on that post, but it was a private message on Instagram. It was actually a voice note. So I'm gonna read it the way it was sent to me because um I think that will so he said it was so cool, like it was just hovering there, and there was nothing in the middle but just this white ambiance with like a mist. It was just out of this world, and we were like, What is that? And we didn't have cell phones then anyway. It started to move slowly, and when it got a bit away from us, imagine a rocket ship, the propulsion jets at the bottom, usually three on a rocket. There were two of them on this, the size of three combined, and each one had this purple-reddish plasma inside these huge circular jet things. It was wild. Um, the way that he described this for context is that he was walking with a friend near dusk and he saw this big black ship near some telephone poles, and it was just kind of hovering there. I asked him for more details, and that's what he said. Um, interesting, the purple-red plasma, we've heard about that before. Jet propulsions, heard similar things. Um, the they didn't have cell phones, unfortunately, so um they didn't know what to do. Like they obviously couldn't take pictures, but they describe it. Um, they've been talking about it ever since. So it's not like the traditional UFO stories, like you don't always hear about the propulsion. In fact, it's usually opposite, but I just thought it was interesting that right away um people had experiences readily available. And again, I'm not necessarily looking for stories that have been proven 100% true. I just want to hear what people experience because whether it was a weather balloon or an airplane, when people experience something they can't explain, it has an effect on them. And that is what I really want to about. Then I uncovered, so there's a few sites that you can go to to look at cases that have been reported, but maybe not um reported by the media. So these are people who call in official reports. Um, and there's a few sites that you can get those at. And then there was one that stood out to me, which was somebody had seen a triangle near um a highway in Red Deer. And the triangle just kind of hovered in the sky, it didn't move. And I thought that was really interesting. Um, a lot of the reports I was reading were basically I saw lights, um, and then they realized it was a balloon or it was a plane, but this one didn't really have an explanation and they actually marked it faux. So I came across the report of the triangle craft. I wanted to hear more, so I posted about it in a red deer Facebook group, and within minutes, people were commenting. I got a few messages in my inbox. These people, um, a lot of them had seen triangles, um, different times, different years, different places, but all very similar descriptions. So, again, I haven't dove into any of these stories, but I just wanted to give you a quick snapshot into what is readily available from the average Canadian who is having experiences all the time. So Canada is not silent. Maybe the government is, but the people have been seeing things for years. They just haven't had anywhere officially to put it. So I'm hoping that's changing because you know the narrative is changing and hopefully the government makes it easier for report and then for them to study it. But what strikes me every time, it's not just what people saw, it's how they felt affused, the relief that someone is actually asking, and if they actually are brave enough to talk about it, it's like there's a uh weight lifted off their shoulders. So the stigma is still there, but it's cracking. The fact that 1,052 Canadians filed official UFO reports last year, nearly double the year before, tells me that people are ready to talk. The government just isn't ready or hasn't put together the right system to listen. Here's what this episode is really about Canada's government is quiet, but Canadians are not. There's a Montreal podcast interviewing the biggest names in disclosure. There's a Montreal Canadian who ran the UFO, the country's UFO investigation network, who shared publicly for the first time a case so strange it made him walk away from investigation tire. There's Canada's most prolific UFO researcher publishing a major book this week on government files, and there's over a thousand Canadians a year filing reports on things they can't explain. The conversation is happening here. And next week, the big question, not whether UFOs are real, we've established that, but what does it mean that so many people, people like me, maybe people like you, are drawn to this subject in a way that feels more than just curiosity. What does it mean when the phenomenon starts touching things which we keep separate, like faith and meaning from what we believe? That is next week. That is episode eight. I'm Peter from BC. If you haven't yet, go listen to Area 52, the episode with Luigi Ventelli. It's one of the most remarkable things I've listened to in a long time. Um, and it's Canadian. I know that you'll like it. It's a fantastic story. You can find me at the Canadian UFO Podcast on Instagram and the Canadian UFO Markets at email.com. There's a lot of country up here, even more sky.