On Aug. 4, 1977, Paul Shishis was just a regular teenager working at a Scarborough grocery store.
But, it was no ordinary evening shift. He remembers that day well.
That Thursday night, he said, out in an adjacent open field, the 18-year-old saw what most people encounter only in science-fiction movies: a pear-shaped unidentified flying object with rotating multi-coloured lights in the night sky.
"I was dumbstruck with what I was witnessing," Mr. Shishis said, now 48 and living in Oshawa.
Mr. Shishis' experience is recorded alongside thousands of Canadian sightings, and the recent recounting of his story comes at a time when many continue to pose the elusive age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? This year marks the 60th anniversary of the crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico, where some believe the U.S. military covered up evidence of an alien craft. And this weekend, Edmonton's TELUS World of Science, a respected museum complex, hosted a two-day UFO conference exploring the possibility of intelligent alien life.
For some, the possibility of alien beings visiting Earth is hard to swallow, the stuff of science fiction along the lines of the X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
But one independent Canadian UFO investigator said mysterious sightings in Ontario appear to be on the rise, with this year potentially seeing record numbers.
Brian Vike, who runs HBCC UFO Research from Houston, B.C, records Canadian incidents with the help of a British website.
They reported about 150 Ontario sightings so far this year up to the end of August out of a rough total of 300 in Canada.
Compare that with 188 Ontario sightings in all of 2006, according to another count that also includes Mr. Vike's numbers, the Canadian UFO Survey, and the results could be surprising, he said.
"You're going to have a record-breaking year, no doubt about it," he said.
The Canadian UFO Survey is tabled by leading UFOlogists Chris Rutkowski, who spoke at the Edmonton conference, and Geoff Dittman, perhaps providing the clearest snapshot of Canadian sightings.
B.C. used to be the UFO magnet of Canada. According to last year's survey, B.C. beat Ontario in sightings despite having a smaller population.
In 2002, B.C. logged 176 sightings. Ontario had 128. And the next year, it was even more lopsided: 304 to 150.
But, so far his year, up to the end of August, B.C. only has half of Ontario's numbers, at 81 sightings, according to Mr. Vike.
Mr. Vike said he's at a loss to explain it. He said several sightings were spotted near the Pickering nuclear plant. (Uranium hungry UFO'S)
"Is it something that's attracting them? (I'd say yes) Is it something like the great bodies of water that you have?" After all, Mr. Shishis said he saw the UFO hover over what he believed to be Pickering that August night.
Ottawa is tied in eighth place in the number of municipal sightings with Edmonton and Burnaby, 12, according to the 2006 survey.
The No. 1 municipality attracting UFOs? Maidstone, Sask.
Whatever the reason for higher Ontario numbers, many experts say that Canada lacks a
centralized database for sightings. 