There is, to be blunt, a lot of nonsense about UFOs out there.

Airy-fairy, touchy-feely, “Welcome, alien brothers and sisters” New Age ho-hum. Unsubstantiated, conspiratorial conjecture. And pure, unadulterated fiction.

At the same time, however, no one has ever been able to establish who or what is behind the many documented UFOs that remain truly “unidentified.” There are a lot of those. At least five percent of UFO sightings have eluded explanation in every major study into the matter since the late 1940s. Even the U.S. Air Force’s contentious Project Blue Book, long considered a dismissive whitewash of the true situation by UFO scholars, shut down in 1969 acknowledging that 741 of the 12,618 cases it had investigated over the previous two decades stood as genuine “unknowns.”

The CIA made a peculiar announcement last week via Twitter, too, suggesting on Dec. 29 that its U2 spy plane program was responsible for “more than half” the UFO sightings in the 1950s, particularly those by commercial pilots who didn’t expect to see any kind of aircraft above them at 60,000 feet.

“The reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ’50s? It was us,” claimed @CIA, yet the very declassified report it linked to conceded that the CIA could not explain what caused the other half.

Lots of the most puzzling UFO incidents on record can be found in the annals of international military history, despite long-maintained professions of disinterest on the part of the international military establishment.

These marked perfect points of entry into the subject for Toronto documentarian Wayne Abbott, director and co-producer of the new series UFOs Declassified, which is set to make its domestic TV debut — ahead of airings in the U.S. and the U.K. — on History Canada at 8 p.m. on Friday.

Abbott got his start in sports television, working on CBC’s venerable Hockey Night in Canada and covering multiple Olympic Games for CTV and NBC during the 1980s and early 1990s, but has since made his name as a purveyor of such well-regarded, investigative, military-historical documentaries as Unlucky Lady (about the sinking of the HMCS Athabascan off the coast of France in 1944) and Dieppe Uncoveredthrough his Northern Sky Entertainment production house.

Many of those works were borne of meticulous digging into once-classified Second World War documents, which led Abbott to wonder if he might construct a similar TV project based around the myriad UFO-related documents liberated from official military secrecy since the end of the Cold War.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the UFO subject and the idea of UFOs. Whether the UFOs are extraterrestrial or something beyond our comprehension that’s happening, I’ve always found it one of the greatest mysteries and jumped at the chance to actually produce television shows based on the subject,” says Abbott.

His tactic with UFOs Declassified was simple: take that one simple, but crucial step beyond so many other UFO programs that have come before and provide hard evidence to shore up the first-person testimony of witnesses. For him, the new show is simply an extension of his previous investigations into shrouded military history.

“Could we look at the primary sources, the documents and information that were captured at the time?” says Abbott. “Some of it is extraordinary — not just documents that were written within a day or two, but air-traffic controller recordings and police-dispatch tapes that were recorded at the time. And this is what we wanted to base it on.”

The initial, six-episode run of UFOs Declassified delves into several storied cases of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

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The infamous “Roswell Incident” of 1947 gets an airing, of course. Along with that obvious target, however, the series gives sober, even-handed consideration to some other unusual aerial happenings not quite so well known outside UFO-enthusiast circles.

There’s the 1942 “Battle of Los Angeles,” where U.S. troops fired more than 1,400 rounds to no avail at a gigantic flying object seen by hundreds of witnesses (and photographed) before it vanished without a trace. The waves of triangular-UFO sightings over Belgium, England and the U.S. during the late 1980s and early ’90s that eventually, after extensive investigation, prompted the Belgian Air Force to declare the phenomenon completely beyond explanation are given a thorough examination in “Black Triangles.”

Meriting an episode of their own, too, are the compelling, multi-day visitations by unknown objects — not to mention at least one landing that left a triangular indentation and radiation traces on the forest floor — in Rendlesham Forest near the joint U.S./NATO bases of RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, during the Christmas and Boxing Day holidays in 1980.

Check out a sneak peak of Episode One of UFOs Declassified

The latter is of particular interest to Nick Pope. A onetime appointee to the U.K. Ministry of Defence’s cryptically titled Air Staff 2A division who converted from skeptic to believer when handed responsibility for overseeing British military’s UFO files, he released his own document of the Bentwaters incident entitled Encounter in Rendlesham Forest last year and served as a consultant and onscreen expert for UFOs Declassified.

“I hope I have brought to it a degree of gravitas and authority and, hopefully, historical accuracy,” he says. “I think this subject — if I’m being generous — sometimes I’d say it’s one percent signal, 99 percent noise. And hopefully, one of the things that I’ve been able to do is help Wayne and (co-producer) John Moores find the good stuff. We don’t want just stories. We want stories where there’s a verifiable audit trail of government documents that can back up the story — where, for example, we know that there is radar evidence or photographic evidence.”

Stories are fine, says Pope, “as long as they’re caveated as such.” But for some of the stories UFOs Declassified focuses on he was actually able to source the original documents from the U.K. National Archives. This sort of due diligence is where UFOs Declassified ranks a cut above a lot of its alien-obsessed TV brethren.

The “hard” cases tackled by UFOs Declassified are those that torment pilots and leave physical evidence such as impressions in the ground, distressed or singed vegetation and radioactive traces — not to mention credible witnesses frequently altered by their experience — in their wake before returning to . . . well, who knows?

Because the very mention of the subject has become an instant magnet for ridicule for anyone who voices a question about the subject, we’re really no closer to finding out than we were when they first buzzed across the popular consciousness at the dawn of the Cold War.

“There were people we wanted to come on board who didn’t want to do a UFO show because there’s a stigma attached to it,” acknowledges Abbott, who blames decades of “bad television shows and movies” and irresponsible reporting for turning UFOs into a no-go zone.

“I think our show does show a lot of compelling evidence. There’s nothing definitive to show what has happened over the last, say, 70 years — which is sort of the area that we’re looking at — to say that they are extraterrestrial, but at the same time there’s nothing definitive to say that they’re not.”

Pope is just pleased to be involved with a program that operates “more from a historian’s perspective as opposed to a wide-eyed believer’s perspective” and stays “focused on the things that really do go above stories and get into the area of verifiability.”

“This subject, I suppose, is like a religion, in a way. Everyone’s got an opinion on it, and most of those opinions are pretty polarized,” he says, offering a two-pronged opinion of his own on why so many people refuse to look deeper into an obvious “known unknown” that has resisted mainstream scientific inquiry for decades.

“I think there are two things. The first is the fact that I already mentioned, that there is so much noise and so little signal that there is a tendency for people to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

The second thing keeping people from acknowledging the reality of UFOs — and again, you don’t have to believe in extraterrestrials to accept the reality of UFOs — is “a little more psychological.”

“This is so deeply challenging to some people’s worldview and their paradigm that it maybe takes them to a place where they would not be very comfortable,” says Pope. “The religion analogy I used deliberately. I think if something comes along that so fundamentally challenges your understanding of the universe and your place in it that it is, for some people, deeply uncomfortable, they are resistant from going down a path that might take them to that place. “