The Lumsden Halo: Several Aircraft Crews Report a Descending Light over Saskatchewan (2015)

Transport Canada keeps a database of aviation incidents called CADORS. Most of what goes into it is routine. Now and then, an aircraft crew reports something they cannot identify, and it goes into the log in a few dry lines. One of those entries, from a winter morning in 2015, has never been explained.

January 10, 2015. Airspace handled by the Winnipeg Area Control Centre. Near Lumsden, a town in the Qu'Appelle Valley 31 kilometres northwest of Regina, multiple aircraft reported "a very large object with a small white light in the middle, surrounded by a halo." It was moving northbound.

One pilot saw something more. The object appeared to descend from above FL410. That is about 41,000 feet, more than 12 kilometres up. The sighting lasted one to two minutes.

The occurrence went into CADORS. Like most such entries, it named no crews, no airlines and no flight numbers. Summaries of the government paperwork mention a CIRVIS report from Winnipeg. A compilation of CADORS cases by Paul Dean for NICAP also appears to contain the entry. But the original record has proven hard to open, and its finer details remain unverified.

Even the hour is in question. VICE called it "a pre-dawn Jan. 10, 2015 encounter." The 2015 Canadian UFO Survey gave 1 pm. CADORS times are kept in UTC. If the original read 1300 UTC, that is seven in the morning in Saskatchewan, well before a January sunrise. The survey's afternoon may simply be a misread clock.

No official investigation followed. Transport Canada's general position, quoted by VICE, was blunt: "Reports of unidentified objects can rarely be followed up on as they are as the title implies, unidentified."

Ufology Research in Winnipeg took a closer look. Chris Rutkowski and his colleagues placed the case among the "Most Interesting Canadian 'Unknowns' in 2015." That list is kept for cases "found to be very reliable, very strange, and had enough information available to make a substantial evaluation." It was a busy year. The survey counted 1,267 reports, the second highest total since 1989.

No published source has offered a conventional answer. If the encounter came before dawn, a waning gibbous Moon and a very bright Jupiter were in the sky. A bright point wrapped in a halo is also how a strong light can look through high ice crystal cloud. But airline crews usually know the Moon and Jupiter when they see them. And neither explains an object that seemed to sink from above 41,000 feet.

In April 2021, the case resurfaced. Daniel Otis wrote about it for VICE, in a piece on commercial pilots reporting UFOs over Canada. Rutkowski told him such observations deserve investigation from "a flight safety and public welfare perspective." Beyond that, the trail goes cold. No witness has come forward. No photograph exists. All that remains is a handful of lines in a government log, and a halo over the prairie that nobody has explained.