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[[Image:Ch-home.gif|thumb|right|© 2008 The Halifax Herald Limited]]
== The Clipping ==

Mysterious lights spotted over Prospect Bay this week probably weren’t extraterrestrial visitors trying to find their way to Shag Harbour for the upcoming UFO festival.

Heiner Kullack of Hamburg, Germany, went to the village southwest of Halifax on Wednesday night to do some birdwatching. But it wasn’t hummingbirds or cedar waxwings that left an impression.

At about 9:45 p.m., while sitting in the van he’s used to drive all over Canada, the 68-year-old retired school teacher noticed a bright stationary light in the sky over an island across the bay.

That light was joined by a second. Both eventually faded away.

Portions of videos he shot with a hand-held digital recorder can be seen at thechronicleherald.ca.

Mr. Kullack, who plans to return to Germany on Sunday, is at a loss to explain what he saw.

“First I thought it was the top light of a sailboat,” he said Thursday. “But then when they did not move and disappeared, I thought maybe it could be a UFO or something. A very strange object.”

Asked if he believed in UFOs and visitors from other planets, he let out a long sigh.

“I don’t believe. But after that, I’m not sure.”

In one portion of video, shot using the camera’s zoom feature, one of the lights appears to have a border near its edge and a series of swirling dots near the centre. At one point, a pair of black dots obscure a portion of the light from the right side.

Mr. Kullack said he was “a little bit afraid” observing the “aggressive” lights.

All the lights had faded from the sky by about 10:15.

Mr. Kullack said he knocked on the door of a nearby house but the residents had not seen anything unusual.

But they were noticed by others in the area.

Ryan O’Toole, a cook at the Bay Landing restaurant and lounge in Prospect Bay, saw the lights from the bar Wednesday night and recalled seeing similar ones about a month ago.

After that first sighting, a friend explained they were naval flares, so Mr. O’Toole wasn’t concerned about the lights this week.

Even so, one bright light followed by a dimmer, more distant light got his attention.

“I kept looking at it,” he said. “I was drawn away from conversation looking at it. It didn’t really cause any alarm. But whenever you see anything like that, the first thing you do is call the coast guard, because it could be an actual distress signal.”

A relative told him the orange colour of the flare meant it was being used for training.

That, in fact, appears to be the explanation for the mysterious lights.

The crew of a CC-130 Hercules airplane from 14 Wing Greenwood was conducting a search and rescue exercise in the area at the time, said Maj. Paul Doucette of navy public affairs.

“They were doing some training with flares. That’s what people saw.”

Capt. John Pulchny, a spokesman for 14 Wing Greenwood, said illumination flares can be dropped out of planes or helicopters and are equipped with small parachutes so that they float down to the water very gradually.

But what about the apparent activity on the surface of the bright object in the film?

After viewing the video, David Lane, an observatory technician at Saint Mary’s University, said those swirls seem to be “optical aberrations” created by a lens that can’t focus on a distant light.

The lens can add rings and speckles and colours, said Mr. Lane, who recently had an asteroid named after him. The atmosphere can also alter the appearance of colours and make objects in the sky seem to come and go.

As for the source of the mysterious light, before being told about the navy training exercises, he said the planet Venus is by far the most common culprit behind reported UFO sightings. But Venus would not have been visible from Prospect Bay at that time of night Wednesday.


== Credits ==

Special thanks to the Chronicle Herald.


== External Links ==

* [http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/Front/9007863.html Original Chronicle Herald Article]

[[Category:UFO_Newspaper_Clippings]]