Paul Hellyer's "UFOs are as real as the airplanes" speech, Toronto 2005

Paul Hellyer was Canada's Minister of National Defence from 1963 to 1967, under Lester B. Pearson. UFO reports barely touched him then. He was, in The Hub's words, "too busy unifying the Canadian Armed Forces to be able to worry about them." Still, on 3 June 1967, he opened the St. Paul, Alberta UFO landing pad.

In February 2005, an ABC special presented by Peter Jennings, UFOs: Seeing Is Believing, made him take the subject seriously. He turned to a book on his shelf, The Day After Roswell by Col. Philip J. Corso. At first he took it for a "work of skillfully contrived fiction." But there were too many real people, dates and events for that. Then a retired U.S. Air Force general, never named, gave his verdict: "Every word of it is true, and more."

Sunday, 25 September 2005. The University of Toronto. Hellyer, 82, had already made headlines that month by announcing that he believed in UFOs. Now he said it formally, at the Toronto Exopolitics Symposium. "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."

He warned that the U.S. military was preparing weapons that could be used against the aliens. "I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something." Roswell, he said, had been classified above top secret from the outset. "The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge." The organisers reported a standing ovation.

Then something personal. One evening, on a Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, Hellyer was with his late wife and some friends north of Toronto. "It looked like a star, but it manoeuvred in a way that stars don't."

Years later he gave a fuller account. "The two of us stood there transfixed for twenty minutes, looking up at this thing moving first in one direction, and then another." They ruled out a star, a satellite and the space station. "There was really no explanation for it other than it was, in fact, a UFO."

20 October 2005. The symposium, Steven Greer's Disclosure Project and the Institute for Cooperation in Space asked Senator Colin Kenny to hold Senate hearings, with Hellyer as a witness. The Senate said it could not schedule them in 2005. No Canadian parliamentary hearing appears ever to have followed.

Critics questioned his evidence, not his sincerity. York University astronomer Michael De Robertis said in 2007: "I think the probability that there is someone out there for him to make contact with is highly improbable." Maclean's called him a "crazy person" in 2015. No government had offered public physical proof, and Corso's book is itself widely disputed. No investigator appears to have studied the Thanksgiving light.

Hellyer never retreated. In 2013, at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington DC, he said "at least four species" had visited Earth and "at least two of them are working with the United States government." In 2014, on RT, he called the star of Bethlehem "one of God's flying saucers."

Popular Science called him "the first person of cabinet rank in the G8 group of countries" to say it outright. He died on 8 August 2021, aged 98. In 2023, as the United States held congressional hearings on UAP, The Hub traced a strange Canadian connection back to him.