Montreal Bonaventure Hotel sighting
For three hours guests and staff watched a ring of 8–10 lights over the rooftop pool of a downtown Montreal hotel.
1990 CE · 45.50, -73.57 · status: unexplained
The account
On 7 November 1990 witnesses described a huge, round, metallic-seeming object with lights emitting white rays, drifting slowly north from 7:20 to 10:20 p.m.; police and journalists saw it too. A 2021 Royal Canadian Mint coin commemorates it.
The sceptical view
Lights reflecting on low cloud or haze have been proposed; no photos showing a solid object exist.
The researched reading
A light ring over a hotel watched for hours by police and journalists. It sat right over the brightly lit rooftop pool under a thick cloud deck, which points to reflected light rather than a craft.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A known natural phenomenon | 40% | A low, dense cloud deck with ice crystals reflects ground lights as light pillars and ghostly shapes that hover and fade as the cloud thickens, which is exactly how the object disappeared. |
| Something known, misidentified | 25% | The light ring sat directly over the hotel’s rooftop pool, whose underwater lights match the arrangement seen; city lights below a cloud deck are a familiar source of “stationary ships”. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 15% | Richard Haines and Bernard Guénette concluded a huge silent object hovered for hours; their size estimate depends on unreliable angular judgments. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 7% | Size estimates ranged wildly and many were made months later. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 6% | An unusual atmospheric light is possible, but the pool alignment fits better. |
| Undetermined | 5% | The share a generic explanation had beyond what has been shown for this case: it fits many cases like this one, but has not been demonstrated for this one. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 1% | Police and journalists saw it; nobody invented it. |
| Secret human technology | 1% | Nothing fits. |
Official position: Police and RCMP responded; no official explanation was given. A civilian report by Haines and Guénette called it unexplained.