A Kamloops, B.C., woman is hoping the public can help her solve a mystery about something strange she caught on camera back in early August.
Wendy Brown was testing out her new Galaxy cellphone, and was using a lightning storm to do it.
Brown was testing a feature called "Single Take" on the phone, which takes photos or video images in 10-second bursts. She was recording the storm but didn’t realize until afterwards that she appears to have caught something strange.
"I was completely shocked when I saw that clip and I was [thinking] 'Oh my god what did I just record? What just happened?' I couldn’t sleep," said Brown.
At the very end of one of the 20 or so clips she recorded, Brown appears to have captured an object trailing downwards out of the sky towards Paul Mountain.
It has the appearance of perhaps a meteorite coming down in the distance, but the very end of the clip shows the mystery light fall in front of the mountain.
She noticed the object in her video when she got home later and was checking images before deleting them.
"I was like, how did I not notice that? I was focused on hitting this button on my phone when I probably should have been looking at the mountain," she said.
Brown was outside her vehicle near a bench along the Halston Bridge overlooking the North Thompson River at the time, so a raindrop on a windshield can be discounted. Meanwhile, a raindrop on the lens of the phone itself would also likely be much larger on the final image, Brown says.
She’s baffled by what the anomaly could be.
"Is there a glitch going on with my phone? Is there something going on?" she wondered.
ACADEMIC REACTION
The question was put to a representative of the Department of Physical Sciences at Thompson Rivers University.
"With all the lightning activity the sky was pretty bright and I doubt it would have been a meteor, even though the Perseids were going on," said associate professor Dr. Joanne Rosvick.
Rosvick doesn’t think it’s anything astronomy related.
The question has also been presented to the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc, the First Nation on which Mount Paul and nearby Mount Peter are located on. Band administrators are reviewing the video as are members of the Kamloops Astronomical Society.
Brown says she was hesitant about coming forward about the mystery, saying she didn't want people to think she'd "been in the sun too long."
But she was too puzzled by the mystery to keep quiet and hopes a member of the public can help determine if something actually fell from the sky or if others are correct that it’s just some sort of illusion from the camera.
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