Lights in sky prompt questions

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This article was published 31/08/2022 (1278 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A mysterious line of lights spotted in the night sky by onlookers near Elphinstone has been identified by a UFO expert.

And, while the object, or rather objects, in this case didn’t turn out to be anything as exciting as an extraterrestrial visitor, he said such reports are important.

Winnipeg-based science writer Chris Rutkowski, founder of the Canadian UFO Survey, said the same phenomenon reported near Elphinstone prompted numerous reports from across Canada.

“Sometimes it was described as a caterpillar set of lights, or a string of pears, or sort of a cigar with lights on it, that type of thing,” Rutkowski said, adding the lights progress across the sky

On Tuesday, a Brandon Sun reader sent a photo of a line of light set against the night sky. The photographer asked not to be identified but passed along some details about where the picture was taken.

The smartphone picture was snapped on Aug. 19 around 10:15 p.m. by a witness who was standing along a highway between Sandy Lake and Elphinstone. The lights appeared to be 400 feet in the air, and seemed to make a “swoop” motion.

So, what was it?

“That’s consistent with a bunch of other reports we got,” Rutkowski said of the description of the Elphinstone-area sighting. “It was the Starlink satelite chain.”

Starlink is a network of satelites run by SpaceX with the goal to provide internet access across the planet. To do that, it is launching thousands of small satellites into orbit so they can transmit internet back to Earth.

They are launched in batches, and as the satellites travel to their final orbit, they appear in a line — light from the sun as it rises or sets reflects off the satellites and they appear as a line of dots. Their final destination is an orbit of 550 kilometres. The report received by the Sun of lights being as low as 400 feet is likely the result of an illusion created by great distances.

These launches have taken place since 2019 and produced reports from curious Earth dwellers.

The sighting by the Elphinstone witness adds to about 20 to 25 such reports made across the country that same night, Rutkowski said. Those reports came from such locales as Ontario, Nova Scotia, and across the Prairies, he said.

While cases like this had a simple explanation, he said, that doesn’t mean the reports aren’t valuable. It helps to overcome the stigma surrounding UFO sightings that prevents people from making reports in the first place.

“In many cases, people aren’t reporting this type of thing,” Rutkowski said. “The fact that we can explain many of the cases suggests that the people who report seeing things that don’t have easy explanations are actually seeing something very unusual, and that they’re not making it up, that it’s not hallucinations and things like that, that there’s something physically there.

“So it adds to the body of understanding the phenomenon as a whole.”

Those who report such sights aren’t alone. Rutkowski estimates there are 750 to 1,000 similiar reports in Canada annually.

Earlier this year, Brandon–Souris MP Larry Maguire said UFO sightings should be taken seriously and called on the government to standardize the collection of reports of UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), as they are otherwise known, so they can be analyzed.

» ihitchen@brandonsun.com