MONTREAL -- Montrealers looking up into the sky Wednesday night might have seen something unusual.
Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, but some Montrealers thought it could have been a UFO.
"I was outside enjoying the cool air and waiting to get a picture of the full moon when this came across the sky," said Leslie Arsenault. "I didn't realize this is not normal."
The lights were seen across different parts of the Greater Montreal Area.
"I didn’t know what to do with it, so I did some research and found out that this same flying object was seen in Colombia and Chile at the beginning of May," said Mehak Sakhrani, who saw the lights at 9:30 p.m. in Brossard on the South Shore. "I’m sending this to you in hopes of reaching out to anyone else who saw it. It’s truly unexplainable."
Bryan Gosman saw the lights flying overhead in the West Island.
"I came out and saw that there were helicopters and what looked like jets," he said. "This was crazy."
There is an explanation for the strange sightings; one that's a little less extraterrestrial.
Experts say the bright lights are from Starlink satellites, launched into space by Elon Musk's company SpaceX.
It's a satellite internet service that promises high speeds and low latency without requiring broadband infrastructures.
The satellites have been nicknamed "mega-constellations" for the way they move, orbiting low to the Earth, in the same scope as the International Space Station.
Experts explain the reason the low-flying satellites are so easily visible to the naked eye is because they reflect sunlight.
SpaceX says it has tried to reduce the reflectivity of its satellites after complaints from astronomers by adding an anti-reflective coating to its newer satellites.
