Have you seen any mysterious lights in the sky recently?
A number of people in the Cowichan Valley claim to have spotted some unusual lights in the night sky last week.
Cowichan Bay’s Jim Quayle said on the night of March 17 at approximately 9 p.m, he saw a line of lights all travelling at the same speed and direction, from north west to south east, from the deck of his home which overlooks the community’s government wharf.
“They were as bright as an average star, and I thought they looked like a series of aircraft all spaced equally apart and travelling at about 30,000 or 40,000 feet in the air,” he said.
“My son, who lives next door, told me about the lights and we watched them for about 10 minutes until they went out of sight. I have never seen anything like it before.”
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Shawnigan Lake’s Ian Purcell said he was standing on his porch at dusk on March 16 when he saw a string of lights appear on the horizon behind the lake.
He said there were at least 100 of them and they seemed to grow smaller as he watched, which gave him the impression they were gaining altitude.
Purcell said he saw another string of lights in the sky the next night, March 17, about half a kilometre north of his house.
“It was a continuous string of lights like before, but that night it looked like some of them were travelling side by side,” said Purcell, who had another UFO sighting in 2017.
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“At one point an airplane flew past at what seemed to be about the same altitude as the lights and I thought I saw the reflection of the lights on the plane. I thought maybe the lights were Starlink satellites (launched by SpaceX) but I heard you could block out the Starlink satellites with your fist from the ground. This string of lights went right across the night sky.”
These similar sightings weren’t the only ones on Vancouver Island recently.
According to the National UFO Reporting Centre’s website, there was a sighting on Feb. 20 in Victoria of a string of white lights in the sky travelling single file and uniformly spaced, and on Feb. 19, also in Victoria, there was a report of lights that looked like stars travelling across the sky in formation.
Some comments on the website suggested that sightings of strings of lights in the sky could be some of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
In May 2019, SpaceX launched the first 60 Starlink satellites, which are hoped to eventually provide affordable internet access to people around the world, into orbit.
According to SpaceX, about 800 satellites are needed for just “moderate” coverage.
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Canadian UFO disclosure expert Victor Viggiani said the sightings on Vancouver Island could be satellites, or they could be something else.
He said, depending on the sky conditions, the sightings could be reflections from objects on the ground, temperature inversions, satellites or something stranger.
“Without seeing the lights, or pictures of them, there’s no way of knowing for sure,” he said from his home in Mississauga.
“But it’s not uncommon for people to see strings of lights in the sky, and I have seen pictures and videos of them, mostly from South America and Mexico for some reason.”
Viggiani said sometimes reports of lights in the sky are ones that singularly dart all over the place, and sometimes they appear as what looks like braille writing or hieroglyphics moving in formation.
“I’ve seen a video of a string of lights that was spotted over the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami struck it, and six of the lights began moving around the plant at random while six more remained in a line above it,” he said.
“Eventually, they all formed back into one light and disappeared. It was bizarre.”
robert.barron@cowichanvalleycitizen.comLike us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
