It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s …. well, no one truly knows what it is.
Tyler Arden of Abbotsford, B.C., was in Kelowna on Friday morning when he spotted an odd object streaking across the sky.
“I was loading up my van, around 7:10 a.m., or so, and as I’m loading up, I heard a delivery driver go by. Then I heard him stop and back up. And, as he backed up, I turned at looked at him,” Arden told Global News.
“And he pointed to the sky and said ‘Do you see that?’ And I turned around and looked and said ‘What the heck is that?’”
Arden said the object looked to be on fire, with a trail of black smoke.
“I walked to a good spot where I could get a good view and took that picture,” said Arden, adding he watched the object from a hotel parking lot for about five minutes.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. My first thought was a contrail, but the orange section of it never changed over time, which I thought it would as the sun came up.”
The Fraser Valley resident said after watching the mysterious object, he loaded up his van. He said the delivery driver took a photo of the image he captured on his cell phone.
Arden said “there was no noise, no nothing. I’m really curious as to what it was. As I said, my first thought was a contrail from a plane. But it didn’t seem like it was a contrail because it had a start point and an endpoint.
“And if you zoom in on the photo, it seems like it was actually spiralling as it was moving.”
Global News reached out to several organizations, asking for their input.
The H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver said its astronomer thinks it’s neither a meteor nor satellite debris.
“It was visible in the sky for too long for it to have been a meteor or a fireball,” the Space Centre told Global News in an email. “The light from meteors and satellite debris don’t usually last for minutes.”
The Space Centre added there were also no reports of a fireball sighting from the International Meteor Organization.
It also posted a link from the American Meteor Society, which has a webpage on fireballs versus contrails.
Kelowna International Airport says it was made aware of the object via media requests, but added it has no instrumentation to track objects like that.
In Manitoba in November, an apparent fireball slashed across the morning sky.
According to Scott Young of the Manitoba Planetarium, fireballs are very bright meteors.
“It’s one of those maybe once-in-a-lifetime or twice-in-a-lifetime sightings, so if you saw it, good for you,” Young told 680 CJOB.
“One of these happens somewhere in the world probably every day, but of course, most of the world doesn’t have people on it, so the odds of an individual seeing it are pretty low … but this actually rains down from outer space pretty commonly.”
— with files from Sam Thompson