Recounting this Kelowna UFO sighting

It was July 5, 2021, and a group of friends were skateboarding at Ben Lee Park.

Just after 5 p.m., one of them looked to the east, towards the mountains, and noticed a white ball, illuminated by the sun.

It moved south for a minute or two, stopped for about 30 seconds and then travelled diagonally away from the group, climbing in the sky to the south.

The group lost sight of it for a few minutes then it appeared in its original location.

“It looked like nothing I have seen before because it was a round spherical object that was brightly illuminated by the sun,” the sighting reported on UFOBC reads. “It looked perfectly round, and it was white or metallic. There was no light source.”

That was the lone description of an official unidentified flying object sighting in Kelowna last year, according to the 2021 Canadian UFO Survey.

Since 1989, Ufology Research has solicited UFO case data from known and active investigators and researchers in Canada. Chris Rutkowski assembles the information and publishes the findings each spring.

The Kelowna sighting was one of just 722 recorded in Canada in 2021, a far cry from the 1,243 in 2020, and the lowest since 2003. Despite the decline in reports, at least two UFOs are reported each day in the country.

Just over seven per cent of all UFO reports were classified as unexplained.

British Columbia made up for around 14 per cent of all accounts.

The typical sighting lasted for about 13 minutes.

“Popular opinion to the contrary, there is no incontrovertible evidence that some UFO cases involve extraterrestrial contact. The continued reporting of UFOs by the public and the yearly increase in numbers of UFO reports suggests a need for further examination of the phenomenon by social, medical and/or physical scientists," Rutkowski wrote in the report.

Other Okanagan Sightings

A handful of other communities up and down the valley reported strange things in the sky last year, too.

In Peachland, a video went viral in mid-March, detailing an orange fireball falling from the sky and sparking a backyard fire. That event is officially listed as ‘unexplained.’

Penticton logged three official reports. One person, on May 15 at around 10:41 p.m., reported a grey cigar shaped object with a row of lights on it.

On September 7, at 7:02 p.m., one person reported seeing a fireball that disappeared into the night sky.