A Parksville resident witnessed a strange light in the sky when she found herself up early the morning of Sept. 11.
Cecilia Leggett looked out the window of her Parksville home at 5:30 a.m. and at first thought the North Star was extra bright, until she took a closer look and noticed the sky was otherwise completely black.
“It first caught my attention due to the size of it and the brightness of it when I looked out the window beside me,” Leggett said. “There wasn’t another star in the entire view of the sky, which is what piqued my interest and I began taking photos.”
The light stayed where it was for approximately 40 minutes and then “all of a sudden it just went to the east, straight up, until it became a pin prick and invisible,” she added. It appeared to move slowly and took a few minutes to move out of her view.
When Leggett zoomed in on the video later, she noticed the light was made up of alternating orange and yellow shapes.
To the naked eye, but not on the recording, the object looked like an upside down Y, she said.
“It looked to me like there were these two lines coming down from it, but going out to the sides,” she added.
Based on the video and the position of the light in the sky, there are a few possible explanations for the light, according to Gregory Arkos, PhD and a professor in the Department of Physics, Engineering and Astronomy at Vancouver Island University.
It may have been a plane climbing to altitude, and headed toward Leggett, which could make it look stationary in the sky.
The light could have also been the planet Venus, which would have been bright and in that part of the sky at the time of Leggett's observation.
"Or perhaps some sort of [search and rescue] helicopter working out over the strait," Arkos said. "I’ve seen that from Nanaimo and it was cool but also confusing until I took a big zoom lens and managed to see what it actually was."
Five days later on Sept. 16, Leggett, was up early again and saw a similar light. It looked quite large, where it was in the sky near the moon, and she got the impression it wasn't too far away.
A few hours later the moon was no longer visible, but the light was still there. This time she did not wait to see if it was going to move, and decided to go back to sleep.
The PQB News reached out to Transport Canada, which reported it was not aware of the activity described, and confirmed it had not received any similar reports.
Transport Canada collects aviation occurrence information and enters it into the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System.
