I took my family to the local fireworks display saturday night. Around 9:15 PM I looked up into the sky and seen an unusual sight moving from east to west… what appeared to be a large triangular shaped object with two bright lights at the rear corners, with the tip of the triangle pointed toward the west. Behind the lights were two smaller lights , one of which I can reasonably assume was a plane because of the blinking lights, the other did not seem to have blinking lights. The speed and flightpath were unremarkable other than they seemed somewhat lower than most of the domestic jets I see going over…the blinking lights were much clearer and brighter.
The only thing I can imagine it could have been was a mid air refueling, but it just seemed odd to do that over a populated area.
Any ideas?
You left out the most important clue . . . your location.
Sorry, the east coast of Nova Scotia, Canada
Quite literally, I was about fifty feet from the ocean.
Also, what colour were the lights?
hmmm. Well aircraft typically have a steady red and green light on the left and right wingtip respectively, a steady white light at the tail and flashing white lights on the wing tips, tail cone and on top of the tail. So it doesn’t really match up with that, of course you might have just not been able to see the red and green lights.
I was thinking that maybe the bright lights were at the end of the fueling nozzles?
Pilot141 is a poster here who’s done that sort of flying, he’d be better able to tell you what lights you’d see on aircraft doing midair refueling.
It just seemed odd to see something like that. I am sure there is a reasonable explanation, I am just curious to verify what it was. There was probably 400 to 500 other people standing around me at the time and quite a few of us in our group were looking at it and speculating what it could be. I tried to take some video with a small Kodak digital camera but it just came out black. Hopefully Pilot141 will be able to shed some light on it for me.
Make no assumptions about how high up this thing was: Humans really have no way whatsoever to tell how far away something in the sky is. If you “thought it looked lower than most jets”, that’s just your brain playing tricks on you; it could have been any height at all.
Most likely, the lights you saw were all one aircraft, and you just don’t realize it, because you were assuming the wrong height for it.
Hundreds of planes pass by here everyday and night a cruising altitude, that was what I was using as a reference as far as the height was concerned. The lights just seemed brighter and clearer as opposed to other planes in the sky that night. If that was a single plane I can promise you I have never seen anything that big in the sky before in my life.
But without knowing how high it was, you can’t tell how big it was, either. Maybe it was the same size as all the other planes you’ve seen, but just seemed big because it was flying lower than you thought.
I agree with what you are saying, but this attracted quite a bit of attention. It really stood out compared to what we are used to seeing. We have an airport nearby and the atlantic flight corridor above us and I tend to sit outside at night and watch the sky, it was definately different.
Something like this makes sense, but I have never seen it before to say yes for sure:
Refueling
I checked out the web page for the festivals organizers and left a message asking if anyone had a pic that came out half decent. If I get a reply I will post it.
9:15? It wouldn’t be dark at that hour here but was it getting that way if you were going to see fireworks? I remember seeing something that looked really weird when a plane had left its landing lights on (though it had taken off) and want through cloud. Could that be an explanation? One or two aircraft unusually with their landers on? If you seriously misjudged the height, I know the ISS and Shuttle catching up with it were supposed to be notably visible a few weeks ago but they would just show up as little lights moving west to east.
