Imagine driving on a snowy highway at night and seeing a row of lights in the sky… and you suddenly realize it’s a giant UFO! This is the scene depicted on our fifth Canada’s Unexplained Phenomena coin, which tells the story of a UFO encounter in the Yukon. On the night of December 11, 1996, at least 31 people in four different areas reported seeing a UFO in the sky. The bright lights described by the witnesses have been re-created on this rectangular coin’s reverse, where a more complete picture of the giant UFO comes into view when the black light paint technology is activated.   

The 1996 Yukon UFO “mothership” incident is our fifth UFO story.

December 11, 1996: It was a clear and cloudless night when a motorist driving along Fox Lake (Kwätän ’aya) on the Yukon’s Klondike Highway noticed a bright and unusual light. As he got closer, he observed a group of rectangular lights moving east in the sky. About a half-hour later, motorists in two separate cars also spotted a row of lights and got out of their car to get a better look. Within minutes, the UFO was almost directly above one of the witnesses, who described a large white beam coming from the centre of an object the size of a football stadium! Two more witnesses travelling from the other direction provided a similar description (with additional flashing lights), while a sixth witness saw multicoloured lights.

Earlier that evening, four people driving north towards Carmacks had observed a UFO with three flashing orange lights and several small white lights arranged in an elliptical pattern—a description similar to the one provided by a family of five who viewed the UFO from their house in Carmacks.

Near the village of Pelly Crossing, a trapper described seeing the same row of lights, as well as a luminescent green beam and two more rotating ones. Four women observed the UFO while taking a break from classes at the community college, and two more local witnesses compared the length of its lights to the width of the Big Dipper.

And finally, in the village of Mayo, the strange lights were observed by at least eight more witnesses, including out-of-town hotel guests and several teenagers who similarly described the mysterious object as being very large.

What was it they saw? All we know is that a large UFO, one of the largest ever reported, was seen by multiple witnesses that night, and all within a short timespan.