Home / On the Record / Hellyer 2005

• 25 September 2005Address date
• University of TorontoVenue
• Exopolitics TorontoConvenor
• 1963 to 1967Hellyer as Minister of National Defence

The Statement

The central line of the address, picked up by Canadian and international press the following day.

UFOs are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head.

Hon. Paul Hellyer, University of Toronto, 25 September 2005

The Witness

Paul Theodore Hellyer was born in Waterford, Ontario in 1923. He was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 1949 at the age of 25 and served continuously until 1974. He was appointed to Cabinet by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in April 1963 as Minister of National Defence and held the post until September 1967. As Defence Minister he is best known for the politically contested unification of the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force into the single Canadian Armed Forces, which entered force on 1 February 1968. He was a Privy Councillor from 1963 onwards, an appointment held for life, and remained closely engaged with national security and defence policy discussion through to his death in 2021.

Hellyer's own account of the path to his 2005 address ran as follows. In February 2005, the ABC News documentary Peter Jennings Reporting: Seeing Is Believing aired in the United States and Canada. The programme covered the post-Roswell history of US government UFO investigation in journalistic format. Hellyer watched the broadcast and then, prompted by the documentary, read Colonel Philip J. Corso's book The Day After Roswell, published in 1997. Corso, a former United States Army intelligence officer, had described in the book a direct programme of reverse-engineering recovered alien technology through US defence contractors. Hellyer assessed Corso's account as substantively credible. He then made the decision to speak publicly. The Toronto Symposium on Exopolitics was the venue he chose.

What Was Said

The 25 September 2005 address ran beyond the single line that the press would highlight. Hellyer placed the UAP question in a framework of intergovernmental secrecy, asserted that several governments were aware of the reality of extraterrestrial contact, and expressed direct concern that "an intergalactic war" might be triggered by Bush administration weaponisation policy directed at perceived non-terrestrial actors. He referenced the 24 January 2005 statement by then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the need to develop space-based weapons capability. Hellyer characterised himself as "so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something."

The address established the position that Hellyer would expand on through the rest of his life. He spoke at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington DC on 30 April 2013, at the University of Calgary in September 2014, and at multiple subsequent venues including the European Parliament-related events of 2017 onwards. The line from the 2005 Toronto address, "as real as the airplanes that fly over your head," became the canonical Hellyer quote and remained the most-cited line throughout his subsequent public engagement on the subject.

Aftermath

The Canadian press coverage was substantial. The Globe and Mail published a major news feature; CBC News covered the address; Canada Free Press editorialised through November 2005; and the broader international press picked up the story through October and November. The address was followed within Canada by a period of cross-government engagement with the question. The Sun News Network and TVO subsequently archived the recorded address and follow-up interviews.

Hellyer continued to speak publicly on the subject for the remaining sixteen years of his life. He died at his home in Toronto on 8 August 2021 at the age of 98. His position, as established at the Toronto Symposium and developed across subsequent addresses, remains the most institutionally significant cabinet-level public statement on the documentary record of the UAP question by any Western government official.

Source and Provenance

From the Archive

• Hellyer's line on the On the Record page
• The Disclosure Network
• Gordon Cooper to the United Nations
• Edgar Mitchell on Kerrang Radio