Chris Rutkowski

Chris Rutkowski is a Winnipeg-based science writer and the most publicly recognized UFO researcher in Canada, a role built over more than four decades since his university astronomy studies in the 1970s left him fielding sighting calls his colleagues dismissed outright. He co-founded Ufology Research (formerly Manitoba Ufology Research/Study) and for over thirty years has compiled Canada's annual national UFO survey, a statistical database of reported sightings drawn from police, military, and civilian reports across the country. Rutkowski has written and co-written more than a dozen books, including a detailed account of the October 1967 Shag Harbour incident off the coast of Nova Scotia — in which multiple witnesses, RCMP officers, and a Canadian military search-and-rescue operation responded to reports of a craft plunging into the harbor — which he has described as one of the best-documented and most credible cases in Canadian UFO history precisely because of the volume of official paperwork it generated. He has also worked as a science communicator for the University of Manitoba while maintaining that his interest lies less in ultimate answers than in careful documentation: pressed repeatedly in interviews, he has said most Canadian reports have mundane explanations, but a small residue — Shag Harbour prominent among them — remains genuinely unresolved. His public nickname, 'Canada's UFO guy,' reflects decades of media appearances synthesizing government archive research with fieldwork.