text: On 17 November 2020, a buoy moored in  of water on Amphitrite Bank in the Pacific Ocean  off Ucluelet, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, at  recorded a lone  tall wave among surrounding waves about  in height. The wave exceeded the surrounding significant wave heights by a factor of 2.93. When the wave's detection was revealed to the public in February 2022, one scientific paper and many news outlets christened the event as "the most extreme rogue wave event ever recorded" and a "once-in-a-millennium" event, claiming that at about three times the height of the waves around it, the Ucluelet wave set a record as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time in terms of its height in proportion to surrounding waves, and that a wave three times the height of those around it was estimated to occur on average only once every 1,300 years worldwide.
  The Ucluelet event generated controversy. Analysis of scientific papers dealing with rogue wave events since 2005 revealed the claims for the record-setting nature and rarity of the wave to be incorrect. The paper Oceanic rogue waves by Dysthe, Krogstad and Muller reports on an event in the Black Sea in 2004 which was far more extreme than the Ucluelet wave, where the Datawell Waverider buoy reported a wave that was 3.91 times the significant wave height, as detailed in the paper. Thorough inspection of the buoy after the recording revealed no malfunction. The authors of the paper that reported the Black Sea event assessed the wave as "anomalous" and suggested several theories on how such an extreme wave may have arisen. What sets the Black Sea event apart is that it, like the Ucluelet wave, was recorded with a high-precision instrument. The Oceanic rogue waves paper also reports even more extreme waves from a different source, but these were possibly overestimated, as assessed by the datas own authors. Furthermore, a paper by I. Nikolkina and I. Didenkulova also reveals waves more extreme than the Ucluelet wave. From the paper, they infer that in 2006 a  wave appeared in a sea with a significant wave height of . The factor difference is 5.38, almost twice that of the Ucluelet wave. The paper also reveals the MV Pont-Aven incident as marginally more extreme than the Ucluelet event. The paper also assesses a report of an  wave in a significant wave height of , but casts doubt on that claim. Finally, perhaps the most extreme rogue wave event ever recorded (but not by a high-precision instrument), is revealed by Craig B. Smiths paper. The incident saw a  wall of water arise in "calm seas." Such "extreme" rogue waves are rare but could pose a danger to any ship in the oceans.