Case files — North America (non-US weight) and the Caribbean

The US is deliberately thin here: it already dominates the public record, and AARO's own statistics are carried in 03-statistics-and-trends.md. The value of this file is Canada, which ran two government programmes and a national reporting pipeline that quietly ended in 1995.

Canada

1. Project Magnet — 1950–1962 (state programme)

• Run by Wilbert B. Smith at the Department of Transport, with a policy interest in whether geomagnetic phenomena could explain UFO reports. Broadly seen as sympathetic to an extraterrestrial interpretation; the project was downgraded and closed in 1962 after no results.
• Sibling programme: Project Second Storey (1952–1954), a Defence Research Board committee set up to review the evidence. These two are Canada's counterparts to Project Blue Book.

2. Gander, Newfoundland — 10 February 1951

Rating: B. A US Navy aircraft flying Gander → Iceland reported a near-collision with a large, orange, circular object that "almost literally flew circles around" the aircraft. Single-aircraft report; military aircrew.

3. Falcon Lake, Manitoba — 20 May 1967

Rating: B (physical injury, contested). Prospector Stefan Michalak reported contact with two flying saucers; he was left with a grid-pattern burn on his chest and a corresponding pattern burned into his shirt. Reports to police and hospital images are contemporaneous — which is what keeps the case alive. Sceptic Aaron Sakulich reviewed the police report and concluded Michalak was burned but probably through an alcohol-related accident, and that he may have invented the encounter to keep other prospectors away from his silver claims. The Royal Canadian Mint put the case on a $20 silver coin in 2018 as the first in its "Canada's Unexplained Phenomena" series — a good example of a case promoted to folklore before evidence.

4. Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia — 4 October 1967

Rating: B (multi-agency response, no recovery). A large unknown object was reported to impact the water near the fishing village of Shag Harbour. What makes it unusual is the paper trail: investigations by the RCMP, the Canadian Coast Guard, and Canadian Forces Navy and Air Force, plus later review by the US Condon Committee.

• Pre-incident context: ~19:15, Air Canada flight 305 (Halifax → Toronto) crew reported a brilliantly lit rectangular object on a parallel course with a trailing string of lights, then two silent explosions — the second fading to a blue cloud. Separate porch sightings at Mahone Bay and a report from the fishing vessel MV Nickerson of Sambro flesh out the evening.
• Status: unresolved (documented). No wreckage recovered, no accepted explanation; official searches found nothing.
• Site note: the strongest non-classified Canadian case — it is documented by agencies that had no UFO agenda.

5. Clan Lake, Northwest Territories — June 1960

Rating: C. A prospector told the Yellowknife RCMP detachment (18 June 1960) that he and his partner had seen a 1.2–1.8 m wide hovering object strike the lake surface a month earlier. The RCMP investigated and found nothing. Included as an example of an early northern report with a police record — a category almost absent from the global literature.

6. Canada's reporting pipeline, 1968–1995

• Non-meteoric sighting reports (i.e. UFO reports) were gathered by the National Research Council's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, and are now held by Library and Archives Canada under "Canada's UFOs: The search for the unknown" (roughly half the documents specify a location).
• The NRC stopped collecting sighting data in 1995 and states it has no UFO mandate; access-to- information records show it nevertheless kept fielding sightings for years afterwards.
• Why the site should use this: it is the cleanest example of a country quietly ending state collection while public reporting continued — the volume did not stop, the listening stopped. Civilian databases (MUFON Canada, Rutkowski's annual surveys) fill the gap.

United States — baseline only

• Project Blue Book (1952–1970) closed with roughly 12,600 reports catalogued, of which a few hundred remained unidentified — the origin of the phrase "the residue". Earlier projects: Sign (1948), Grudge (1949), plus the Robertson Panel (1953) and the Condon Committee report (1968), which recommended against further official study. Verify the exact Blue Book totals against the NARA microfilm before publishing a number.
• 2017–2026: AAWSAP/AATIP-era documents, then the UAP Task Force, then AARO with annual Congressional reports and public file releases (six batches by September 2026, including 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on warp drives, wormholes, antigravity, negative-mass propulsion and cloaking). See 03 for FY2024/FY2025 numbers.
• Non-US relevance: US releases repeatedly cite foreign cases (e.g. the 1995 Bariloche encounter in Argentina, Gulf/Middle East 2025 mission reports), which makes them a useful secondary source for other countries' files.

The modern instrumented era — 2004–2019

The three sensor cases below are the reason AARO exists. They are US cases, but they belong in this pack anyway because they are the instrumented anchor of the archive's own re-institution era — the events whose footage broke the modern subject open in 2017 and forced Congress to fund a standing office. They are treated here with the same discipline as every other case: the sensor record is real, the "anomalous" reading of it is contested, and AARO's own later analysis has walked back two of the three.

8. USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" — 14 November 2004 Credibility: A (radar + FLIR + trained aircrew) · Status: unresolved (instrumented), contested

• Platform: F/A-18F Super Hornets of VFA-41 "Black Aces", operating from the Nimitz carrier strike group ~100 mi southwest of San Diego; the Princeton (CG-59) was the radar ship.
• Witnesses: Cdr. David Fravor (VFA-41 commanding officer), Lt. Alex Dietrich, and two weapons-systems officers — four people who described the same object for roughly five minutes; the FLIR tape was shot by WSO Chad Underwood minutes later.
• What was reported: Princeton operators had tracked contacts descending from ~80,000 ft to sea level in under a second over the preceding weeks. Fravor saw a white, smooth, ~40 ft "Tic Tac"-shaped object — no wings, no rotor wash, no visible control surfaces — hovering above a roiled patch of white water; when he spiralled down toward it the object climbed to meet him, then departed at speed. Underwood later locked the FLIR on a smaller target that vanished off the left of frame.
• Official record: the footage and account were released by the DoD on 27 April 2020; a 13-page AATIP-era report on the encounter has since surfaced; Fravor and Dietrich testified under oath to the House Oversight Committee in July 2023. AARO continues to list the case as unresolved.
• Leading conventional readings: a distant conventional aircraft misread on FLIR (the classic parallax argument), or a sensor artefact. These account for the video; they do not account for the Princeton's multi-day radar track or for four aircrew describing the same close-range object in daylight. AARO's own 2024–25 material has not produced a definitive identification.
• Why it belongs here: it is the single case that restarted state interest in 2017, and the archive's era-5 ("re-institution") spine is unintelligible without it.

9. "Gimbal" and "GoFast" — USS Theodore Roosevelt, January 2015 Credibility: A at release, downgraded on AARO review · Status: mostly resolved (parallax)

• Platform: F/A-18Fs from the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, East Coast of the US, in early 2015; two short FLIR clips released with the New York Times story in December 2017.
• "GoFast": an object that appears to skim the ocean at extreme speed. In November 2024 AARO director Jon Kosloski told the Senate the apparent speed is parallax — the object is closer to the camera and higher than it looks, so the aircraft's own motion is misread as the object's; AARO assesses with high confidence it showed no anomalous speed.
• "Gimbal": an object that appears to rotate on axis while flying level. AARO's public imagery review has not conclusively resolved it, and notes the rotation is most plausibly a gimbal mechanism artefact rather than the object turning.
• Site value: the honest pair to the Nimitz case — footage that was treated as smoking-gun evidence for years, and which AARO's own trigonometry largely deflated. It documents that the modern era's "instrumented" label is a starting point, not a conclusion.

10. USS Omaha / USS Russell swarms — July 2019 Credibility: B (sensor video + radar, no aircrew close-range) · Status: assessed non-anomalous

• Platform: multiple Navy ships off San Diego in July 2019; FLIR and shipboard radar captured clusters of objects — the Russell's video showing several pyramid-shaped contacts, the Omaha's a spherical object that the Pentagon later released.
• Official handling: the footage was shown publicly by Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray at the May 2022 House hearing; AARO's subsequent analysis treats the 2019 swarm contacts as most consistent with drones or balloons, not anomalous technology.
• Site value: the clearest example of a swarm event whose "unknown at the time" status was mundane in retrospect — a counterweight to the idea that every released military UAP clip is unexplained.

11. Socorro, New Mexico — 24 April 1964 (Zamora)

Credibility: B (single officer + physical trace, investigated) · Status: unresolved (documented), hoax reading on file

• Witness: Socorro police sergeant Lonnie Zamora, alone, on a routine patrol south of town.
• What he reported: an egg-shaped, aluminium-white craft resting on landing legs in an arroyo, with two small figures beside it and a red insignia he later drew for investigators; on approach it rose with a blue-orange flame and a roar and departed.
• Evidence: the physical trace is what elevates the case — landing-gear depressions in the ground and burned bushes at the site, examined within hours. Investigated by Project Blue Book (J. Allen Hynek visited) and the FBI; no identification was ever made.
• Leading conventional readings: a hoax — a long-running claim attributes it to a prank by students at New Mexico Tech; the burned-bush and impression evidence is real but does not establish a craft. Hynek himself considered Zamora credible.
• Why it belongs here: it is the US's closest analogue to Trans-en-Provence — a single-witness case whose standing rests on sampled ground trace rather than on the witness's word alone, and the cleanest 1960s American trace case.

Caribbean

Coverage in the retrievable literature is thin, and that is the finding worth publishing: no Caribbean state runs a UAP office, and no national archive release comparable to Brazil's or the UK's was found for the region. Reports surface mainly through US databases (NUFORC) and press coverage rather than any state record. Treat any Caribbean "case file" claiming official status as unverified until a primary document is produced.