NUFORC Sighting 138921

Occurred: 2018-01-23 21:30 Local
Reported: 2018-02-24 08:49 Pacific
Duration: ~1 hour or less
No of observers: 3

Location: Trail (Canada), BC, Canada

Shape: Unknown
Characteristics: Emitted beams

Flashing or moving bright blue-white light shines in window, neighbour describes being frightened by strange sound in night sky.

While visiting my former home town of Trail, BC, I had the strangest experience on the evening of Tuesday, January 23, 2018. We were in a house in the Gulch, along Rossland Avenue, near St. Anthony's Church. Two of us were seated on a couch watching television. Starting around 9:30 p.m., my viewing was occasionally interrupted by intermittent flashes of bright blue-white light shining into the bathroom window, which faces northwest. The television is next to the hallway leading to the bathroom. The light would flash in the window for a second or two, then stop. A minute or two later, it would do it again. It kept doing this at irregular intervals.

At first, I thought it was a neighbour playing a prank with a bright spotlight, and I found it quite irritating as it repeated several times, sort of a sweeping motion or flashing. But then it occurred to me that the light was shining downward toward the window, and I thought that it could be someone playing with a light on the hillside below Highway 22, or possibly lights high on a vehicle (like on top of a truck or snowplow) on the highway, except there are a lot trees that would be in the way and it would be an incredible inconvenience for someone to be hiking up there in a snowstorm. In addition, the lights were too bright to have come from vehicles as far away as the road. As the flashing persisted, I then realized that the light was coming from much higher than that, as if from the sky. That piqued my curiosity, so I went to the back door of the house to see if there was some issue with the power lines. It had been snowing heavily all day and evening, so I wondered if the storm was shorting out wires or flashing over insulators and causing arcs. I stood and looked at the lines for about half a minute, but seeing no further flashing, went back inside. By then, it was a little after 10 p.m.

Shortly after returning to my place in front of the television, more lights flashed through the window, brighter than previously. So, I went into the bathroom to look through the window to see if I could find the source. Still, I couldn't see where they were coming from.

My wife, who had seen me check outside and then check the bathroom, asked what I was doing, and I described the flashing lights I had seen. She then explained that she could see lights flashing on the bed throughout that time. The lights seemed to be coming in the bedroom window, which faces southwest. The ceiling light had been turned on with the dimmer switch turned down low, so she had assumed that the dimmer circuit was somehow causing the light to flicker brightly and creating an optical illusion. From my vantage point, I couldn't see into the bedroom. From her vantage point, my wife couldn't see into the bathroom. Neither of us thought to mention the peculiar lights to the other.

Around 11 p.m. our area of the city began experiencing power outages lasting up to about 10 minutes each. I'm pretty sure they were caused by the heavy, wet snow that was accumulating, and not in any way connected to the flashing lights. However, each time the power went out, I looked out the windows to see how much of the neighbourhood or the city was affected. But at no time did I see any more blue-white flashes. They had ended by about 10:30 or a little earlier.

The next morning, while I was shovelling the previous night's snow from our walks, a neighbour asked if we heard the "weird noises in the sky last night." I asked her what the noises were like and she described a type of whirring or trilling sound that was unlike any she had heard before. She said that this was around 9:30 when she went to have a smoke on her porch. She didn't see any lights, but she said that the sound was overhead and frightened her enough that she cut short her break and went inside for the rest of the night.

When I was outside and when I looked out the windows the previous evening, I could see that the overcast sky was low on the hillsides, below 500 meters (we were at about 425 meters elevation). If there was something up there shining lights, it would have to have been pretty low to penetrate the heavy cloud cover and snow. I wonder if anyone else in the area saw or heard anything.

(Please note: I filed a similar report with ufobc.ca after returning home from our trip. This is a copy of that report, edited slightly for clarity. The ufocentre.com website was not working at that time.)

Posted 2018-03-02

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