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What was that in the night sky?
That question was being asked by many residents across B.C.’s north and Interior, as well as parts of Alberta and Vancouver Island, after an unusual sighting Tuesday night.
Between about 10:15 and 10:30 p.m. PT, multiple residents reported seeing a large, white shape slowly move across the horizon before disappearing from view.
People across B.C. were left scratching their heads between about 10:15 and 10:30 p.m. PT on May 5 when they witnessed something float through the sky before disappearing. Guesses as to what it was range from a weather balloon to a SpaceX rocket to something a little more out of this world.
Sarah and Jared Siemens of Vanderhoof, B.C., said they had just been telling their son that while it’s fun to believe in UFOs and other worlds, it’s most likely they don’t exist. Mere hours later they spotted the phenomenon.
“It’s like, hey, you should believe,” Sarah said, with Jared calling it, “really bizarre.”
Videos have been posted by residents in community Facebook groups from Williams Lake to Prince George to Fort St. John, over a span of hundreds of kilometres. Reports of the sighting have also been received from the Nass Valley, Kamloops, Oliver, Vancouver Island and Sherwood Park, Alta.
“I thought it was the moon,” said Ashley Megan, who pulled over to film the occurrence when she saw it near New Aiyansh, in northwest B.C.
“It was super weird,” said Brooke Merritt, who spotted it in Hixon, south of Prince George.
Many people said they were enjoying all the speculation about what they might have seen.
“I think it brings out this really playful part of people to just talk about things they wouldn’t even believe in,” Sarah Sieman said.
Sighting was likely SpaceX rocket: Astronomer
Suggestions for what the sighting may have been range from an errant weather balloon to something more out of this world.
Malhar Kendurkar, president of the Prince George Astronomical Observatory, saw the object and said he’s confident it was the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which could be seen over California earlier in the evening after it took off just before 9 p.m. PT from the Vandenberg Space Force Base to distribute more Starlink satellites.
He said the rocket’s unusual shape and appearance could be explained by what’s referred to as a “jellyfish effect” due to the booster on the rocket’s exhaust expanding in the upper atmosphere, giving it the look of a glowing cloud, rather than a flame.
“It is really cool,” he said, while also noting that the addition of more items in space is making it more difficult to see natural phenomena like stars.
Night sky getting busier
Michael Unger, director of programming at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, said while he didn’t see the shape himself, based on video it didn’t appear to be a natural occurrence such as a meteor or cloud cover.
“It certainly looks controlled,” he said, while adding any guesses he could offer would be pure speculation.
Unger said instances of unidentified phenomenon sightings are becoming more and more common as night skies become more crowded by everything from drones to private satellites to rockets, operated by groups like SpaceX.
Patricia Seymour was one of dozens of people to observe this shape moving across the horizon on the night of May 5, 2026.
“Those things are just more common in our society now,” he said.
Unger also said there are more opportunities to film and share what people spot, a trend that is useful to scientists trying to track sky and space activity — such as when an apparent meteor lit up southern British Columbia a week ago.
“I think when we do get some of these instances, it sparks that curiosity of reminding ourselves that there is a lot up there that we’re missing and we don’t know,” he said.
