Montreal
LocationCityMontreal
LocationCityMontreal is Quebec's largest city, where dozens of witnesses, police officers among them, reported a large ring of lights above the Hotel Bonaventure rooftop on November 7, 1990.
Montreal is Quebec's largest city, where dozens of witnesses, police officers among them, reported a large ring of lights above the Hotel Bonaventure rooftop on November 7, 1990.
Montreal is the largest city in Quebec and the second-largest in Canada, centered on the Island of Montreal at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers. The city had about 1.76 million residents in the 2021 census and its metropolitan area about 4.3 million. Its main airport, Montréal–Trudeau International, was formerly Dorval International Airport, the name it carried when its radar was checked during the city's best-known UFO case.
On the evening of November 7, 1990, guests and staff at the rooftop pool of the Hotel Bonaventure, above Place Bonaventure downtown, reported a ring of lights in the sky with beams of white light, which stayed nearly stationary for about three hours before vanishing into thickening cloud. The roughly forty witnesses included an American tourist, hotel security staff, Montreal Urban Community police officers, an RCMP investigator and journalists from La Presse, which reported the sighting the next day; some witnesses also spoke to CBC television. Air traffic control at Dorval and Mirabel told police that nothing appeared on radar. The episode is known as the Montreal UFO incident.
Researchers Richard Haines, a former NASA research scientist, and Bernard Guénette, a computer graphics specialist, investigated and in a 1992 report concluded that the lights came from an object rather than a meteorological or optical effect, estimating a central body hundreds of meters across. In the magazine Le Québec sceptique, a skeptic noted that the object was apparently seen only from near Place Bonaventure and not from other downtown buildings, and some later French-language reviews favor partial light pillars, a rare effect in which ice crystals reflect ground lights into vertical columns, as the most probable explanation.
In 2021 the Royal Canadian Mint made the sighting the fourth coin in its Canada's Unexplained Phenomena series, a glow-in-the-dark silver piece. The city stayed in UFO conversation in 2026, when creator Chris Ramsay released a live Montreal edition of It's Probably Nothing in March and residents posted videos of lights over the St. Lawrence and downtown that they could not identify. With police officers, a federal investigator and newspaper reporters among its witnesses, the 1990 sighting remains the defining event in Montreal's UFO history.
20/ The Montreal incident has been pushed and pulled between two finished stories. One says a craft more than half a KM wide hovered above Hotel Bonaventure, defied radar and then moved east towards a military base. The other says ice crystals reflected city lights and a group of people mistook that for a structured object. The surviving record doesn't let either side solve the mystery of what happened that night. This is still one of Canada's best urban UFO cases to date. The observation beg...
19/ In 2021, the Royal Canadian Mint turned the event into the fourth coin in its Canada's Unexplained Phenomena series. The silver coin shows a disc above the rooftop pool, with colored beams reaching down through the night. Under ultraviolet light, the scene actually glows, how cool is that! The coins existence says something about the place the Montreal incident now holds in Canadian UFO history. A federal Crown corporation chose this case because the police response, newspaper photographs...
18/ The Montreal case is a strong one because the witness group is substantial. A tourist, hotel staff, guests, several Montreal police officers, an RCMP investigator, professional journalists and an airline pilot stood on the rooftop at different times. Between 40 and 75 people may have passed through during the event. The first police call was made at 7:38, only minutes after the first sighting, and the newspaper was contacted before the object disappeared. The duration is also a key factor...
17/ The main sighting finished at the hotel when cloud covered the formation. A later report raised the possibility that something moved east across Montreal after the rooftop witnesses lost it. Pierre Caumartin, a film and video producer, told the investigators that he was driving home between about 10:30 and 11 p.m. when he saw strange lights low in the sky. He described a luminous boomerang shape near the cloud level, moving slowly east. Near his home, around 7.4 miles east north east of H...
14/ The cloud is usually treated as an inconvenience because it hid the final minutes of the sighting. It could actually be the most important physical part of the event. Weather observations from Dorval show a front approaching Montreal from the west. At 7:30 visibility was about 15 miles, with scattered cloud near 6,700ft. By 8:30, cloud had developed around 3,000ft with an overcast layer at about 4,500ft. The ceiling fell towards 3,400ft by 9:30 and was around 3,600ft at 10 pm, with thick...
13/ There is another part of the official response that has become blurred over time. Modern versions of the story sometimes say that the RCMP, the Canadian military and NASA all launched an investigation that night, before the files were classified within 24 hours. I couldn't find that sequence in the original Haines and Guenette report. The report shows Montreal police and the RCMP responding directly. It says Investigator Morin called Major Thompson at the Department of National Defence's...
12/ The radar result becomes clearer when it is placed beside the weather at the time. Dorval's ASR-5 radar was operating on the evening of November 7. The airport's control tower director later confirmed that the RCMP had asked about an unknown object east of the airport and that no contact was found. Montreal Air Traffic Control also reported nothing unusual. The investigators worked through the radar coverage. At the altitudes suggested for the phenomenon, a conventional aircraft above cen...
🧵The Montreal UFO Incident: What Hovered Above Hotel Bonaventure? (1/20) On November 7th '90, an American tourist was swimming in the rooftop pool of Montreal's Hotel Bonaventure when she noticed a strange arrangement of lights directly above her. Hotel staff came outside and guests gathered around the pool. A security officer called the police, and the first officer who arrived called for his superior after seeing the object for himself. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police became involved. Jo...
Silent white sphere moving intentionally and gracefully in an unconventional flight path over Montreal, Canada — Jul 26, 2026, 1:08 AM
I saw this flying thing in Montreal, hovering faster than planes flying near with laser like lights. I have more clips of some ppl are interested. (Excuse my voice and the background sounds) help me understand Time: 9:30 Location: Montreal
