Sooke resident Ann Talbot was on her balcony around 10:30 p.m. last Friday when she saw something strange – a bright light streak over the treetops near the Sooke Basin, hovering in the sky about 100 metres from her home.
“I thought it was someone’s drone, but couldn’t see anyone around,” Talbot said.
As she watched the strange and perfectly round object, she noticed it was engulfed in a bright pinkish/red light and around one to two metres in size.
“It didn’t have any trail behind it, and it was hard to figure out its size, but it was bigger than a drone,” Talbot said.
The UFO moved across the Sooke Basin, before going across the basin towards Coopers Cove. Trying to keep up with it, Talbot ran to her kitchen, which was on the other side of her townhouse, facing Jenkins Marine.
“It couldn’t of taken more than 15 seconds to go around and across the basin,” she said. “When it went down on the other side, I was yelling to my husband downstairs, ‘Come quick!’ and it just disappeared over the eastside.”
Talbot heard no engine noise, or noise of any kind coming from the object, even when it seemingly zipped across the other side of the basin.
“I just don’t know what it could be, it was interesting. I didn’t think it was a meteorite, because it would of had a trail. I couldn’t hear a thing, no buzzing, no whooshing sound, nothing.”
There’s no drone, of military or civilian spec, that can move at such speed.
No strange weather phenomenon was present either, as the skies over Sooke on Friday night were clear.
As it turns out, UFO sightings are not that uncommon.
Based on a 2016 Canadian UFO survey produced by Winnipeg-based Ufology Research, there were 1,131 sightings of unidentified flying objects reported across Canada – six in B.C.
“Over the years I’ve been receiving sightings reports from people, and there’s no consistency or patterns to the sightings, sometimes there’s a lot, sometimes it just trickles through for a while. It seems to be sporadic,” said Randolf Richardson, who runs the Vancouver-based website, UFOcentre.com as a fun project.
Richardson receives emails and stories concerning UFOs from people around the world, with varying depth and extremity. Still, he welcomes it all, hoping to someday provide a wide collection of UFO accounts and letting the public decide what’s real and what isn’t.
“I’m a skeptic myself, so I don’t always believe the conclusions that people draw. I do believe people are seeing many things, and I love the idea of us not being alone in the universe.”
Some people have approached Richardson with some extreme stories, such as a craft landing in their yard and abducting them, to others seeing strange craft like Talbot, only to see them disappear or take off with impossible speed.
“A lot of them geniunely believe what they’re seeing. A person’s memory can change, but I’d say for the most part, it’s pretty accurate,” Richardson said.
One thing’s certain, whatever the object may have been, it wasn’t military, said Greg Menzies, a media spokesperson at CFB Esquimalt.
“We have no drones flying around, and we don’t participate in exercises in the Sooke Basin.”
Regardless, Talbot hopes someone else in Sooke or surrounding area saw the UFO and would be willing to talk about it.
“It was very interesting,” she said.
