More ‘strings of lights’ reported in coastal B.C.’s night skies

More “strings of lights” have been spotted in the night skies above Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland.

A number of people reported seeing strings of lights among the stars after 10 p.m. on the evening of May 15.

Treena Miller, from Maple Bay, said she watched a string of many lights equally spaced out travelling in a line from west to east for about five minutes.

“I have never seen such a thing and it was in such a progression that I could only think that they were being pulled on a line of some sort,” she said.

“There was no variation in timing or movement and they all faded into dark as they reached the same spot in the sky.”

Roger Walsh said he was stunned to also see a string of lights in the sky after 10 p.m. on May 15 while riding his bike home in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano.

He said the lights he saw were travelling from northwest to east.

“At first I thought they were just a reflection in my glasses, and I was both shocked and curious when I realized they weren’t,” Walsh said.

“They then suddenly went dark for about 10 seconds and then lit back up again. I tried to take a picture, but they went in between some trees and I lost track of them. A friend of mine saw something similar about a month ago and said it was the most bizarre thing he has ever seen.”

Kyle Cheveldayoff and four of his friends also saw a string of about 50 lights travelling northwest at approximately 11 p.m. that night from the Victoria neighbourhood of Fernwood.

“We watched them travelling across the sky for about five minutes,” said Cheveldayoff, a registered psychologist who also happens to be a UFO researcher.

“They were as plain as day. We did get our GoPro out, but I think it was too dark out [to get a video of the lights].”

A similar series of sightings of strings of lights in the sky above Vancouver Island occurred in March, 2020.

While it was never definitively proven, many speculated that those sightings could have been some of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites that began launching at about the same time.

In May 2019, the American aerospace manufacturer SpaceX launched the first 60 of its Starlink satellites, which are hoped to eventually provide affordable internet access to people around the world, into orbit.

It has been reported that last Saturday (May 15) at about 7 p.m. EST, a SpaceX rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and released 52 new Starlink satellites into Earth’s orbit, bringing the total number of Starlink satellites in orbit to more than 1,600.

This was the fourth launch of Starlink satellites in 17 days, and the ninth launch of the satellites since the beginning of March.

Cheveldayoff said that the Starlink satellites may be the answer to the riddle of the strings of lights in the night sky that he and his friends saw.

But he said there were a lot of other unusual things going on in the sky that night as well.

“We also saw a number of what appeared to be satellites that would flash like the flashbulbs on a camera,” Cheveldayoff said.

‘The night of a satellite launch could have provided an opportunity for phenomena that would be unknown to us to take place.”

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