Kristina Stoyko was sitting with friends at Armours Beach in Gibsons around 10:30 at night on July 13 when they noticed something odd in the sky over Keats Island.
“We saw three large glowing lights hovering in a triangle, two white ones flashing and a red flashing one at the top of the triangle formation before taking off and flying over Gibsons,” Stoyko said.
“We couldn’t explain it. We thought it was a cell phone tower at first because of how still the lights were, however they started to rise up into the sky.”
Stoyko said she didn’t think it was a plane or helicopter “or anything of our technology.”
The group also shot video of the objects with their phones.
Coast Reporter sent copies to officials with Transport Canada, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and a local astronomer to see if any of them could explain what the group saw.
The consensus was that it could have been one or more helicopters or even some drone users experimenting with light displays.
Transport Canada said it wasn’t aware of any unusual activity in the skies over Howe Sound that night and didn’t have any reports from other sources of anything similar to what Stoyko and her friends saw.
“Transport Canada collects aviation occurrence information from NAV CANADA and other sources and enters it into the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System,” the agency told Coast Reporter in an email.
“When reports like these are generated, the next steps depend on the type of the incident reported. Further follow up may be undertaken by various organizations including Transport Canada, NAV CANADA, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).”
The RCAF said there were no aircraft from 19 Wing Comox or the 443 Maritime Helicopter Squadron, also based on Vancouver Island, in the air over Keats Island that night and suggested it was likely a civilian aircraft of some sort.
Several UFO sightings over Keats Island have been reported in the past.
In one 1977 case, remarkably similar to the experience of Stoyko’s group, a woman wrote to Coast News to say: “Against the darkening sky my eye was caught by a large, softly glowing white light, moving through the air from the direction of the island… I rushed for my binoculars and went to the window where I saw a large dark shape … thick through the middle and tapering at each end, with a bright reddish light on the trailing edge.”
The woman said the shape began to rise and “drift slowly to the north” and made no sound she could hear.
“This was definitely not an aeroplane nor a helicopter,” the woman wrote.
In a follow-up story, the paper reported that the area above Keats Island is “the most common place for these sightings.”
In March of 1978 a columnist with Coast News offered a more mundane explanation for sightings of strange lights over the islands of Howe Sound.
“From the proper elevation on this side of Howe Sound a straight line can be drawn over the top of Halkett Point [on Gambier Island] and will end up at the BC Rail track to Squamish,” Ann Napier wrote. “On certain occasions at that precise point trains have been known to stop at nighttime with their headlight on.”
Napier theorized that if the conditions are just right, the light from the train would look like a “hovering ball in the air.”
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