Date: February 18, 2012
Time: Evening.
Hello Brian. Last night, I was driving home from Mission by way of Coquitlam to drop off a co-worker before continuing on to North Vancouver. On the route I was taking, as suggested by Google maps, I missed a turn.
When I made a u turn to face the other way, there they were.
Dozens of orange or occasionally red lights, moving upwards and across the sky on a uniform course. They would ascend into view from a point below the line of buildings in front of me, and stay on that ascending trajectory, coming one at roughly regular intervals, but occasionally come in bursts of several to a dozen or more.
But always rose and moved across the sky in similar direction. All the lights also would make it to a certain region in the sky where they would slow down, stop, drift a little, some even backtrack a bit, then fade out and disappear.
It lasted for about 15 minutes, and by the time it stopped I had seen probably close to a hundred lights, all behaving in this way.
I took several photos and several videos with my iPhone. They do not do justice to what the naked eye perceived, as always, but they do demonstrate what I saw.
I am just wondering if this is some sort of lantern festival or flare launching thing done in Port Moody.
I will tell you that I work as a special effects technician in the Vancouver film industry, and so I am knowledgeable and experienced in pyrotechnics and atmospheric effects.
In fact, that is what I was doing in Mission all week on a film, trying to create foggy atmospheric effects over a huge area in the woods, and so therefore trying to get lighter-than-air things like artificial fog to go where you want it and not where the winds want to take it is what we struggled with all day and all this week. And I can tell you it is very tricky, and sometimes it is outright impossible despite your best efforts.
So it was fresh in my mind how improbable this would be to have flares or some kind of very bright airborne lanterns or something to travel in such a uniform way, and not be scattered out in random directions as would be expected from something as fickle and capricious as wind.
Also, the speed with which they moved across the sky would suggest that, if they were wind-born objects, the wind would have to be very fast. Like storm or hurricane speed winds, and there was no such winds last night.
No, they're movement suggested to me that they were under guided control. It is possible they are some kind of military flares, fired from some kind of flare cannon, or even a battery of suck cannons, that could launch flares in rapid succession upon a planned trajectory at great speeds before they extinguish.
This may be so, but I know of no such cannon nor can I imagine what it's possible use could be, militarily or otherwise.
Here is a Google maps pin drop of where I was when I filmed the videos:
2700–2750 Clarke St
Port Moody British Columbia V3H 1Z5
Canada
And from this point I was facing north, looking at, from what I can tell from the map, Anmore.
From where I was it looked as though they were Marin "launched" from approximately here:
588–592 Ioco Rd
Port Moody British Columbia V3H 2W2
Canada
And extinguishing over the water north of approximately here:
588–592 Ioco Rd
Port Moody British Columbia V3H 2W2
Canada
I can of course send you the video and photos if you like. Again they aren't perfect but they clearly show what I'm talking about.
Please if you have any idea what these may be i would live to hear theories.
Thank you.
