Ontario - Carmine Montemarano saw it and he wants to know if you saw it, too.

It was on Dec. 26 about a half an hour or so before midnight, when something that looked like fireworks caught Mr. Montemarano's eye. He was standing outside in the driveway of his cousin's house on a quiet street in the Major MacKenzie and Islington area of Kleinburg, bidding goodnight to relatives after a Christmas gift exchange.

"There was five or six bunched up bright, red lights," he said. "They were a little bit bigger than stars, and they were pretty far up there."

Both Mr. Montemarano and his cousin, Carmine, stared at the cluster of lights for a good five or six minutes, he said. They tried to capture images on an iPhone but the objects were too far away. The pair then watched as they flickered, and vanished. And no, they weren't drinking that night, Mr. Montemarano said.

"Whether or not it's alien related, I don't know, but it was definitely a UFO," he said.

Yes, that's unidentified flying object. And by the sounds of it, pretty darn odd, according to Brian Vike, a UFO researcher who runs the popular Canadian website www.hbccufo.com from his Houston, British Columbia home.

Mr. Vike said there's been a spike in reported sightings since Jan. 1, particularly in the United Kingdom. And while he said about 95 per cent of those cases can be rationally explained as people having seen either a meteor, fireball, satellite or an airplane, Mr. Montemarano's report "is getting into the more weird."

"This sounds like a totally different ballgame and it's unusual," Mr. Vike said.

So far this year, Mr. Vike's website has logged a reported 418 sightings worldwide of unidentified flying objects, 130 of which came from Ontario. He expects that number to climb as the last two months of 2008 haven't yet been tallied.

The 2007 Canadian UFO Report released last July by ufologists Chris Rutkowski and Geoff Dittman includes information about each of 2007's 836 sightings. For example, on Jan. 13, two witnesses report a low-flying circular object with flashing lights travelling slowly in Vaughan.

It scored a three on the strangeness scale and seven on reliability, with 10 being the most unexplainable. That case was considered explained. UFO investigator Mr. Vike said he believes there's life out there, but he can't prove it.

"My big problem is, do they have the means to travel here?" he said.