An amateur photographer from Canada claims to have photographed an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) over the North Shore Mountains in Vancouver, British Columbia.
According to the Vancouver Sun, Anthony Ellis, a resident of the city, only noticed the speck on the slide later, after he downloaded the image to his computer.
"I was quite surprised," he explained, adding that he had not altered the image and the same speck was not visible on other photographs taken at the same time.
Ellis' UFO sighting adds to the number of recent UFO reports; the number is believed to have increased over the past 12 months. According to an annual report from Ufology Research, there has been a 100% increase in the number of UFO sightings in 2012 alone, compared to previous years.
Chris Rutkowski, a civilian science writer and the author of the UFO survey since 1989, explained the increasing numbers of sightings in the recent past by saying there were simply more people watching the skies than before.
"It's something across the board," Rutkowski said, "People in Canada were actually looking up rinto the sky more than in previous years."
For example, in December last year, an American in Vancouver reported seeing a disc-shaped object move out of a cloud formation before changing direction and disappearing. Speaking to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the man said he was watching the sky and admiring the clouds when he first saw the UFO.
"Just beneath the sun there was a cloud out of which a bright, reflective, circular disk-type UFO zipped, changed directions into an upside down U-shaped flight path, and then it disappeared in thin air. The whole thing happened within a matter of an instant. If I had blinked I would have missed it," the unidentified man said, according to a report in Examiner.
UFO sightings continue to draw significant attention and debate, with a photograph, released recently by NASA, one of several in the spotlight. In NASA's image, a disc-shaped object can be seen hovering above the Earth's surface, emitting rainbow-like lights.