VIDEO: Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it a … UFO?

“What is that?”

The first few seconds of a video uploaded to YouTube last week titled ‘UFO sighted in Canada Ontario’ shows a trail of lights briefly appearing in the night sky reportedly in Puslinch before disappearing again — blink and you could miss it.

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The footage was taken around the Victoria Park East Golf Club, according to the user ‘Chelsea V,’ who posted the clip on Saturday. 

In the first few seconds of the video (volume warning), the aerial phenomenon looks like a beam of white light that appears suspended in the night sky. Then, it quickly vanishes.

“Thank you for posting this! My brother-in-law and I saw this in Pickering a few hours earlier. It turned invisible on us as well after like 15 seconds,” a user who goes by tubin187 commented.

In a email statement, professor Richard Kelly, former NASA researcher and current chair of geography and environmental management at University of Waterloo, said he might be able to shed some ‘light’ on the matter.

“If I were to speculate, then to me it seems plausible that it may have been a SpaceX Starlink sighting,” he said. Starlinks are low-orbit broadband communication satellites that provide high-speed internet access, even reaching remote locations. Most recently, SpaceX  launched a group of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit on October 24 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

“Since for each launch the satellites are stacked in a pack of 60, I would expect that immediately following deployment they may line up close together like a train along the same orbital track (plane) and gradually spread out evenly along that track over time,” Kelly said. 

The private space exploration company, which also makes reusable rockets, has flown more than 700 of these satellites into orbit so far, according to the website TechCrunch. 

Seeing a gleaming band of white light across the sky may soon turn out to be a more regular occurrence for skywatchers. Since 2018, the US Federal Communications Commission has licensed SpaceX to create a network of more than 12,000 orbiting Starlink satellites, according to the agency.

Swikar Oli writes for the Cambridge Times, Waterloo Chronicle, New Hamburg Independent and Guelph Mercury Tribune. His reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.

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