Overview
In March 1978, previously inaccessible records connected with Canada's Project Second Storey were made available for outside inspection by the Department of National Defence. The event is sometimes described more broadly as Canada “releasing its UFO files,” but the surviving evidence supports a narrower and more interesting account.
Canada did not open one complete national UFO archive in 1978. Nor did the government stop collecting UFO reports that year. Instead, the release exposed an older set of Defence Research Board records that had remained outside the National Research Council's principal UFO-reporting file even after responsibility for federal UFO reports had been transferred to the NRC in the late 1960s.
The strongest contemporary evidence for the March 1978 opening comes from correspondence preserved within later Canadian government UFO records. Ottawa researcher Arthur Bray, who had been attempting to trace missing Project Second Storey material, wrote in 1979 that the Department of National Defence had released the files in March 1978 and that he found at least 89 UFO reports within them that had never been transferred to the NRC. The same correspondence records his concern that reports involving the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had not all been made available. Canadian federal UFO correspondence — Arthur Bray material
This does not establish that the withheld material contained extraordinary evidence. It establishes something more prosaic but historically important: Canada's UFO records were fragmented across institutions, and even officials and researchers who believed there was a central federal file could discover that relevant material remained elsewhere.
That interpretation is supported by later historical work and by the Government of Canada's own 2025 Sky Canada Project. The Office of the Chief Science Advisor concluded that Canada's federal handling of UFO/UAP reports had repeatedly shifted between organisations, often without consistent coordination. It traced responsibility from the Department of Transport and Department of National Defence through the National Research Council and ultimately into Library and Archives Canada. Office of the Chief Science Advisor — Sky Canada final report
The 1978 event is therefore best understood as a records-access milestone within a much longer administrative history, not as a one-time national declassification.
The 1978 records-access event
Scope of the event
Library and Archives Canada's current description of the federal UFO collection helps clarify the chronology.
The archive contains records originating primarily from the Department of National Defence, Department of Transport, National Research Council and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. LAC states that the documents were accumulated from 1947 into the early 1980s and that approximately 9,500 documents have been digitised. The wider collection discussed by the Sky Canada Project amounts to roughly 15,000 pages. Library and Archives Canada — Canada's UFOs: The Search for the Unknown
The records were not all released together.
Some Project Magnet and Project Second Storey material had already been declassified in connection with the transfer of federal UFO-reporting responsibility to the NRC in the late 1960s. Other material remained in departmental custody. Records were subsequently opened through archival access, direct researcher requests and later access-to-information processes. The large searchable online collection familiar today was created much later.
The 2025 Sky Canada report gives the broadest current official account. It states that responsibility for UFO reporting was transferred to the NRC in 1967, together with declassification of Project Second Storey and Project Magnet material. The NRC then continued collecting reports until 1995, when the function ended and related material was transferred to what is now Library and Archives Canada. Sky Canada final report
This initially appears inconsistent with the statement that Project Second Storey files were “released” in March 1978. The difference is between formal declassification, transfer and practical public access.
A file may no longer carry its original security classification while still remaining difficult for an outside researcher to locate or inspect. Departmental holdings can also contain copies, attachments or sighting reports that were never incorporated into the collection held by another agency.
The 1978 episode appears to have involved precisely this problem.
Project Second Storey
Project Second Storey was created by Canada's Defence Research Board in 1952 during the early Cold War and the first major North American wave of “flying saucer” reports.
The committee was chaired by astronomer Peter Millman and included representatives from Canadian military and government organisations. Its purpose was not to operate a large field-investigation programme comparable to the later public image of the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book. Instead, it considered how Canada should respond to UFO reports, reviewed the security and scientific implications and developed procedures for collecting information.
The Government of Canada's Sky Canada history states that the committee held six meetings between 1952 and 1954. It developed a standardised reporting form but did not conduct systematic investigations of individual sightings. Its eventual position was that the reports did not appear to represent a security threat and did not justify a major scientific investigation. Sky Canada final report
A contemporary outside view comes from the University of Colorado UFO study led by Edward Condon. Researcher Roy Craig visited Millman in Ottawa in June 1968 and recorded that Project Second Storey had reviewed whether a large-scale government investigation was warranted and had recommended against one. Craig also reported that, by 1968, responsibility for maintaining the central file had moved to the NRC and that the file was open to public inspection, subject to protection of witness identities. Condon Report — UFO Study Programs in Foreign Countries
This is important because it demonstrates that some Canadian UFO records were already accessible well before 1978. The later opening of additional Second Storey material therefore did not create public access from nothing. It revealed that the records previously treated as the central file were incomplete.
Project Magnet
Second Storey operated alongside Project Magnet, the better-known Canadian UFO project initiated by Department of Transport engineer Wilbert B. Smith. The two programmes were related but should not be conflated.
Project Magnet reflected Smith's personal and technical interest in whether UFOs could be associated with geomagnetic or electromagnetic principles. The project included experimental work and the establishment of an observing station at Shirley's Bay near Ottawa. Smith eventually came to believe that UFOs were extraterrestrial, but that belief was not adopted as an official conclusion of the Canadian government.
Project Second Storey, by contrast, was an interdepartmental Defence Research Board committee concerned with the government's broader position on reported flying saucers. The distinction matters to the archival story because material relating to the two efforts was distributed across different departments and later collections.
The current LAC access-to-information release catalogue still lists separate historical files titled Sightings of unidentified aerial objects – "Project Second Storey" covering 1952-1953 and 1953-1969, alongside other Project Magnet and defence research records. Library and Archives Canada — release package A-2024-05959
This later archival structure reinforces the basic lesson of the 1978 episode: government responsibility could be transferred without every relevant piece of paper moving neatly with it.
Transfer to the National Research Council
By the late 1960s, Canada's government had largely withdrawn from active UFO investigation.
The Sky Canada Project states that, on the recommendation of the Minister of National Defence, responsibility for overseeing reports was transferred to the National Research Council in 1967. The NRC then became the principal federal destination for reports received from the public, municipalities and other federal organisations.
Millman remained central to this process.
At the NRC's meteor and astronomy functions, reports were placed into what became known as the Non-Meteoric Sightings files. The term reflected an administrative distinction rather than an extraordinary interpretation: observations considered unrelated to meteors could be retained for reference and, where possible, supplied with conventional astronomical or atmospheric explanations.
The Condon study described this system in 1968. Craig wrote that the NRC maintained the central file, carried out relatively few field investigations and focused largely upon preserving reports reaching the government. Condon Report
The resulting system was centralised only in a limited sense.
The NRC was supposed to be the main repository, but RCMP detachments, military units, Transport Canada offices and other departments could continue generating records of their own. Whether every historical report was copied into the NRC file depended upon the practices of the originating organisation and the effectiveness of interdepartmental communication.
By 1978, Arthur Bray was discovering the practical consequences.
Arthur Bray’s records search
Bray was a Canadian UFO researcher who became closely associated with the preservation of Wilbert Smith's papers and the search for government records concerning Canada's early UFO programmes.
His personal archive is now preserved at the University of Ottawa. The finding aid contains both a Project Magnet file and a Project Second Storey file covering material from the 1950s through the period of Bray's later research. University of Ottawa Archives — Arthur Bray fonds
Bray's correspondence shows that by the mid-1970s he was trying to determine whether the NRC's public holdings represented the complete federal record. They did not.
In later correspondence to the RCMP, preserved among released Canadian government UFO records, Bray wrote that he had been told between 1974 and 1977 that the Department of National Defence did not possess further relevant sighting reports. He said that he established in late 1977 that additional Project Second Storey records were in fact held by DND's Directorate of History. According to Bray, these were released for inspection in March 1978. Bray correspondence in Canadian federal UFO records
This evidence needs to be characterised correctly. It is contemporaneous researcher correspondence preserved within government files, not an independently located DND press announcement proclaiming a national UFO-file release. That makes it valuable evidence for the access history while placing limits upon how precisely the event can be reconstructed. Bray was describing what he personally located and inspected. His figure of at least 89 reports is therefore evidence about the material he found rather than a government-certified count of every record in the release.
The 89 reports
Bray's most important claim was not that 89 extraordinary UFOs had been confirmed. It was that at least 89 sighting reports in the newly accessible Second Storey material had apparently not been transferred into the NRC's central collection. That distinction changes the meaning of the episode. A discrepancy between two government files does not tell us what caused the sightings. It tells us something about the reliability of the administrative system used to preserve them. A central database is analytically useful only if researchers know what it contains and what it omits.
If older defence reports remained in a Directorate of History file while the NRC believed or implied that earlier material had been transferred, then statistical analysis based only on the NRC collection would undercount the historical reporting record.
Bray himself argued that even a comparatively small number of missing reports could matter if they contained rare categories such as radar-visual observations. His reasoning is methodologically sound in principle.
A dataset's completeness is not measured only by percentage. Losing one ordinary light report from thousands may have little analytical effect. Losing one of only a handful of well-documented radar-visual cases could materially alter an analysis of that rare category.
What the surviving correspondence does not establish is that the 89 reports were all high-quality cases or that they collectively supported an extraordinary explanation. Their primary importance was archival.
RCMP records and public access
Bray's correspondence also records that not all related files were opened to him.
He wrote that DND had advised him that reports involving RCMP personnel or RCMP records could not be opened at that time without the Force's permission. He later pursued the RCMP directly, arguing that reports remained scattered between agencies. Canadian federal UFO correspondence
This is sometimes susceptible to a dramatic interpretation: if RCMP-related UFO reports were withheld, perhaps they contained the most sensitive evidence. The records themselves do not establish that.
Police files can contain personal information, witness identities, investigative details and material governed by separate disclosure rules. The fact that one department was unwilling or unable to open another agency's material without permission is therefore not inherently suspicious.
At the same time, the restriction mattered for research. It meant that “publicly available Canadian UFO files” could not honestly be treated as a complete national dataset at that point. The event demonstrates how legal custody, privacy rules and bureaucratic boundaries can produce incomplete archives without requiring a centralised conspiracy to hide a particular explanation. That more mundane form of fragmentation can still have significant consequences for historical research.
Archival limits and continuing collection
Declassification and completeness
The Sky Canada Project states that Project Second Storey and Project Magnet were declassified as part of the late-1960s transfer of responsibility to the NRC. Yet a declassified programme can still leave records that are inaccessible, untransferred, difficult to locate or subject to unrelated privacy and archival restrictions. This distinction is central to understanding 1978. A simple description of Canada releasing more UFO files may imply a deliberate national transparency initiative in which the government selected a batch of records and published them. The surviving evidence points toward something less tidy.
A civilian researcher traced records that had not followed the expected archival route. DND then permitted outside inspection of at least some of them. The discovery revealed holes in the NRC collection and led to further efforts to locate additional records.
This was transparency achieved partly through researcher persistence, not merely through a government decision to proactively disclose everything it held. That does not diminish the importance of the opening. It makes the historical mechanism more accurate.
Reporting after 1978
Another reason the event should not be framed as the culmination of Canada's UFO-file history is that federal reporting continued for many years afterwards.
The NRC remained the principal federal service for receiving UFO reports until 1995. The Sky Canada report states that information continued to arrive from the public, municipalities, the RCMP, DND and other sources. Millman and later NRC staff often provided conventional explanations where possible, while retaining many reports in the Non-Meteoric Sightings files. Sky Canada final report
Library and Archives Canada's searchable database contains large numbers of documents created after March 1978.
Indeed, 1978 itself generated many records. LAC's historic database includes material relating to Barrie, Chilliwack, Athabasca, CFB Borden, Calgary, Clarenville and numerous other locations during that year. Library and Archives Canada — Canada's UFO records
The archival release and the reporting system were therefore operating simultaneously. Government could open old files while continuing to receive new ones.
Clarenville
One of Canada's better-known UAP reports occurred later in 1978 near Clarenville, Newfoundland.
The Sky Canada Project identifies the 26 October incident among the country's most prominent historical cases. Several witnesses, including an RCMP constable, reported an oval-shaped object over the harbour; no material evidence was recovered. Sky Canada final report
LAC's historical database contains multiple Clarenville records dated October 1978, illustrating how reports could move into the federal documentary system during the same year that older Second Storey material was being opened. Library and Archives Canada archived UFO database — Clarenville entries
The case is not evidence that the 1978 archival release caused greater reporting, and it should not be folded into Project Second Storey itself. Its relevance is institutional.
It demonstrates that 1978 was not a point at which Canada closed the UFO subject and simply released historical files. Current reports were still being collected while researchers were simultaneously reconstructing the older archive.
What the records contain
The modern LAC collection is often described simply as “Canada's UFO files.” That label is convenient but can obscure the variety of evidence inside it.
The current government portal says the collection contains correspondence, reports, memoranda and procedural documents. Some records concern individual sightings; others concern reporting forms, administrative policy or correspondence about the subject. Around half lack a specific sighting location. Library and Archives Canada — Canada's UFOs: The Search for the Unknown
The collection therefore should not be counted as though every page represents one independent UFO event. One sighting can produce multiple documents. A letter from a witness may generate a police report, a forwarding memorandum, an NRC response and later correspondence. Conversely, a short sighting may survive in only one form. This matters when numerical claims are made about Canada's historical UFO record.
Historian Matthew Hayes, whose doctoral research examined approximately 15,000 pages of Canadian material, estimated that the government documentation included thousands of unique sightings but described the system as fragmented and only loosely coordinated. Matthew Hayes — A History of Canada's UFO Investigation, 1950-1995, Trent University
The difference between documents and cases is therefore essential.
The Canadian system
Comparisons with the United States are useful but can become misleading. The U.S. Air Force operated named projects such as SIGN, GRUDGE and BLUE BOOK with an identifiable organisational chain for collecting and evaluating reports. Canada's system was more dispersed.
Project Magnet and Project Second Storey were short-lived. After they ended, reports continued to arrive through the RCMP, military, Transport Canada and other departments. The NRC eventually became the principal central repository, but it did not operate as a large investigative office with dedicated field teams.
The Condon study in 1968 described Canada's system as one in which relatively few field investigations were carried out and the main emphasis was maintenance of the central report file. Condon Report The 2025 Sky Canada review reached a similar conclusion from a longer historical perspective. It described Canada's federal UAP history as involving changing responsibilities, periods of limited interest and inconsistent coordination between departments. Sky Canada final report The discovery of additional files in 1978 fits this model unusually well.
Interpretation and legacy
The cover-up claim
The existence of records outside the central NRC file can reasonably be described as an archival failure or evidence of poor interdepartmental coordination. Describing it as evidence of an extraordinary UFO cover-up goes further than the surviving documents support. Several explanations can produce incomplete transfer: different agencies retain their own copies; police records remain subject to separate access rules; historical records are deposited with different repositories; older filing systems use different terminology; and responsibility can change without every prior record being identified. Hayes's historical research argues that Canada's UFO documentation was distributed across multiple agencies and archives and that departments often communicated poorly about the subject. Trent University — Hayes dissertation
That explanation is consistent with the 1978 episode. It does not exclude the possibility that individual records were intentionally withheld for security, privacy or other reasons. Government records routinely contain restrictions of that kind. What has not been demonstrated from the release itself is that the missing records were withheld specifically because they established an extraordinary origin for UFOs. The content must be assessed independently of the fact that access was once restricted.
Project Second Storey’s findings
Opening the records also made it easier to distinguish the historical project from the mythology that later accumulated around it. Second Storey was not a Canadian crash-retrieval programme.
The current Sky Canada review characterises it as a Defence Research Board committee designed to examine flying-saucer reports and develop a government position. It worked on reporting procedures and reviewed whether the phenomenon justified continued military attention. Sky Canada final report
The project ultimately recommended against a major military investigation. This conclusion should not be overstated in the opposite direction either.
Saying that the committee found no reason for a large investigation is not the same as demonstrating that every report was explained. Government agencies can decide that a subject does not merit further resources even when individual cases remain unidentified.
The evidential importance of the Second Storey archive lies partly in showing how officials reasoned about the problem, not merely in counting unresolved observations.
The current archive
The public position has improved substantially since Bray's search.
Library and Archives Canada now provides a dedicated online research portal. Its current page states that approximately 9,500 documents are digitised and searchable across four major federal record groups. Library and Archives Canada
The 2025 Sky Canada Project estimates the wider government collection at more than 15,000 pages and states that the material is publicly accessible through LAC, with a large digitised subset available online. Sky Canada final report
LAC's modern access-to-information release portal also demonstrates that historical files continue to be processed. A 2024 request released hundreds of pages associated with Project Second Storey, Project Magnet and related defence records, some fully and some partially disclosed. LAC release package A-2024-05959
This is a useful reminder that archival transparency is not a binary event. A file can move through several stages: classified, declassified, transferred, available for onsite consultation, partially released under access law, digitised and eventually indexed online. The 1978 event represents one stage in that process.
The end of NRC collection
The historical reporting system persisted until 1995. According to Sky Canada, the NRC then stopped collecting UFO reports, and its related material was transferred into the national archival system. Sky Canada final report This is arguably a more important archival transfer date than 1978 if the question is when Canada's federal UFO collection entered its modern archival phase. The significance of 1978 is different. It demonstrated, while the reporting programme was still active, that researchers could not assume the NRC held the complete historical record. That discovery foreshadowed the complexity later historians would encounter when reconstructing Canada's UFO policy.
Sky Canada
Nearly half a century later, the Office of the Chief Science Advisor arrived at a strikingly familiar conclusion.
The Sky Canada Project found that contemporary UAP reports in Canada continue to enter multiple organisations according to their normal mandates. Transport Canada may receive aviation reports, the Royal Canadian Air Force and DND may receive aerospace information, police organisations may receive public-safety calls, and civilian groups maintain their own databases.
The report concluded that Canada still lacks a single cohesive and standardised system for public UAP reporting and follow-up. Sky Canada final report The parallel with 1978 is not exact. Modern information systems, access legislation and aviation databases are very different from the paper-file environment of the 1950s and 1970s. The structural problem is similar: information can be distributed according to organisational mandate rather than collected according to the research question later investigators wish to ask. That makes the 1978 release historically relevant to contemporary UAP policy.
Historical significance
The 1978 opening of additional Project Second Storey material is significant because it illustrates the difference between government knowledge and government record systems. Public debate often imagines a single government archive in which every relevant UFO report is centrally stored and deliberately classified or declassified by one authority. Canada's historical record shows something much less orderly.
Different departments received reports for different reasons. Files stayed with their originating organisations. Responsibility moved from defence and transport bodies to the NRC. Police records remained subject to separate controls. Researchers could be told that the central collection contained the relevant material and later discover that older reports existed elsewhere.
This bureaucratic fragmentation can resemble concealment from the outside because the practical result is the same: a researcher cannot see records that exist. The cause, however, matters. Poor communication, decentralised recordkeeping, privacy restrictions and historical filing practice do not carry the same evidential implications as an organised programme designed to suppress evidence of a particular phenomenon. The 1978 episode is therefore valuable precisely because it complicates both simplistic narratives. It shows that Canadian government UFO records genuinely were difficult to trace and that researchers had legitimate grounds to question claims of archival completeness. It also shows that the discovery of previously inaccessible files did not produce evidence establishing an extraordinary explanation for the phenomenon.
The modern LAC collection, the work of historians such as Matthew Hayes and the government's own Sky Canada review now make this history considerably easier to reconstruct than it was in 1978. Yet the underlying lesson remains current. Before drawing conclusions from a government UAP database, researchers need to know how the records entered it, which organisations contributed, what was never transferred and what remains outside the collection. In that sense, the 1978 release was not merely an archival footnote. It was an early demonstration that the quality of UAP research depends as much upon the architecture of the record as upon the reports themselves.
Evidence assessment
The evidence supports retaining a 1978 event in the UAPRAD timeline, but the event should be defined more precisely than “Canada releases more UFO files.”
What appears to have happened is that records connected with Project Second Storey, held by the Department of National Defence's historical organisation and not fully represented in the NRC collection, were opened to outside inspection in March 1978 after researcher Arthur Bray had traced them.
Bray subsequently stated in correspondence preserved within government files that he found at least 89 UFO reports that had not been transferred to the NRC. The correspondence also indicates that some RCMP-related material remained unavailable at that time.
This is meaningful evidence of incomplete archival consolidation. It is not evidence that 89 extraordinary UFO cases had been hidden.
The broader historical record supports the administrative interpretation. Canada's UFO-reporting responsibility moved repeatedly between agencies. The NRC's central file was primarily a collection and response function rather than a comprehensive investigative programme. Police and defence organisations retained material generated under their own mandates. Later historians have found records dispersed through multiple archives.
The 1967/1968 declassification history also means that March 1978 should not be described as the moment Project Second Storey first became unclassified. Rather, it appears to be the point at which additional Second Storey holdings became practically accessible to an outside researcher after their location had been established. That distinction improves the historical accuracy of the event. It also makes the episode more useful. The most important lesson is not simply that Canada was transparent. It is that access can reveal gaps in what had previously been treated as the available record. From an evidential perspective, this matters because archival completeness affects every later statistical or historical claim made from the database.
If reports are missing because they remained in another department, the absence of those reports from a central collection says nothing about whether the events occurred. Conversely, discovering an old file says nothing by itself about whether the reported phenomenon was extraordinary. The content of the recovered records still has to be assessed case by case. This is the appropriate balance for the 1978 event: a genuine transparency and archival milestone, but not a disclosure of a government conclusion about the origin of UFOs.
Source library
Library and Archives Canada — Canada's UFOs: The Search for the Unknown
The principal current federal archive portal. LAC identifies records originating from the Department of National Defence, Department of Transport, National Research Council and RCMP and states that approximately 9,500 documents have been digitised. It is the best current starting point for examining Canada's historical government UFO record.
Search Canada's official UFO archive
Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada — Management of Public Reporting of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in Canada, 2025
The strongest current official historical review of Canadian federal UAP reporting. It reconstructs Project Magnet, Project Second Storey, the transfer of reporting responsibility to the NRC, the NRC's work through 1995 and the later transfer of records to Library and Archives Canada. It is also important because it identifies continuing fragmentation in Canada's present-day UAP reporting system.
Read the Sky Canada final report
Canadian federal UFO correspondence — Arthur Bray / RCMP material, 1979
Government-file correspondence preserving Bray's account of locating Project Second Storey material outside the NRC collection. Bray states that DND released the files in March 1978 and that at least 89 UFO reports found within them had not been transferred to the NRC. He also records continuing restrictions involving RCMP-related reports. This is the key contemporary source for defining the 1978 event, but it records Bray's account rather than a national DND release announcement.
Read the released Canadian government correspondence
Library and Archives Canada — ATIP release package A-2024-05959
Current official access-to-information package containing historical Project Second Storey and related files. The catalogue lists hundreds of pages of records spanning the early 1950s through 1969 and shows that historical Canadian UFO material continues to be processed through modern access mechanisms.
View the LAC release package
University of Colorado — Condon Report, “UFO Study Programs in Foreign Countries,” 1968
Contemporary external account based upon Roy Craig's June 1968 interview with Peter Millman. It records the history and purpose of Project Second Storey, describes transfer of the central UFO file to the National Research Council and states that the NRC file was already open to public inspection subject to witness confidentiality. Particularly useful for showing why the 1978 event should not be described as the first opening of Canadian UFO records.
Read the Condon Report's Canada section
National Research Council / Library and Archives Canada — 1978 Non-Meteoric Sightings records
LAC's historical search results demonstrate that the NRC continued receiving and creating UFO records throughout 1978. Entries include reports from CFB Borden, Chilliwack, Athabasca, Calgary, Clarenville and other locations. These records help establish that the federal reporting function continued after the March archival opening.
Browse Library and Archives Canada's UFO records
Library and Archives Canada — Clarenville 1978 records
Archived NRC database results include multiple documents associated with Clarenville, Newfoundland, during October 1978. Used here as an example of continuing federal UFO-report collection during the same year as the Second Storey access event rather than as evidence concerning the explanation of the sighting itself.
View the archived LAC search results containing Clarenville records
University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections — Arthur Bray fonds
Official archival finding aid for Bray's papers. The collection includes dedicated Project Magnet and Project Second Storey files and provides institutional provenance for the work of the researcher most closely associated with locating additional records during the 1970s.
View the Arthur Bray fonds finding aid
Matthew Hayes — A History of Canada's UFO Investigation, 1950-1995, Trent University, 2019
Doctoral historical study based on approximately 15,000 pages of Canadian government UFO documentation. Hayes characterises the federal investigation as passive, fragmented and distributed across agencies that often communicated poorly. Particularly useful for evaluating whether the 1978 record discrepancy is better understood within a wider bureaucratic pattern rather than as a standalone disclosure event.
View the Trent University thesis record and full text
Matthew Hayes — Search for the Unknown: Canada's UFO Files and the Rise of Conspiracy Theory, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022
Published scholarly expansion of Hayes's archival research. The work examines the interaction between government recordkeeping, citizen researchers and growing distrust surrounding Canadian UFO information. Included as historical analysis rather than as a substitute for the government records themselves.
View the scholarly publication record
Research category: Government records access / archival history
Event: Additional Project Second Storey records opened to outside inspection
Date: March 1978
Key contemporary claim: Researcher Arthur Bray reported finding at least 89 UFO reports not present in the NRC's central holdings
Important qualification: Project Second Storey had already been declassified in connection with the late-1960s transfer to the NRC; the 1978 event concerned access to additional DND-held records rather than first declassification of the programme
Review date: Evidence assessed through 26 August 2026
Research status: Historical — Canada's wider federal UFO archive is now substantially more accessible through Library and Archives Canada, although its development demonstrates that no single historical repository should automatically be assumed complete.