UFO or no? Night-sky space oddity reported in parts of Ontario
A string of lights floating in the night’s sky were spotted in the Guelph and Acton areas of Ontario on Thursday, but then suddenly disappeared.
What at first was thought to be an unidentified flying object turned out to be satellites that may have been launched by SpaceX.
According to Mike Fich, a professor with the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo, the lights were the sun reflecting off the satellites, and they disappeared because they entered into the Earth’s shadow.
“They will reach the edge where they’re no longer receiving sunlight,” said Fich. “And they will just blink out in not quite an instant, but in the second or so they will be gone.”
Fich noted so many satellites are floating around Earth that sightings are extremely common.
“Now there are thousands, literally thousands of satellites that you can see with your eye if you happen to be looking in the right place, and they happen to be going through that part of the sky,” he said.
Fich said people are seeing a string of lights because not long after the launch of satellites, they’re still grouped together but will eventually disperse the more they revolve around the planet.
SpaceX, a U.S.-based aerospace manufacturer, had launched its Starlink Mission earlier in the day from Cape Canaveral in Florida. CBC reached out to SpaceX to confirm whether people in Ontario would have witnessed this particular launch, but had not yet received a response at time of publication.
According to an unofficial web tool used to track SpaceX Starlink satellites, they would have been visible at about the same time they were spotted in those areas of Ontario.
‘It was super, super weird’
Derek Lance of Acton was having a cigarette with a friend when he noticed the satellite flying overhead.
“I was like, ‘What the heck was that?’” Lance said. “And then actually I kind of got nervous. I actually thought it was a plane crashing, is what I thought it was.”
He said he also wondered whether it was a Russian rocket or a UFO.
“A video and picture does it no justice to what it actually looked like, like no justice at all,” he said. “It was super, super weird. I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life.”
Alejandro Frias also saw the satellite about the same time when he was walking his dog in Guelph.
“Technically it’s a UFO because in that moment, I didn’t know what is that,” he said.
He explained he later figured out it was a satellite.
