The Kensington Lights over the Gulf of St. Lawrence

Prince Edward Island's North Shore faces the open Gulf of St. Lawrence. In June 2014, John Sheppard of Moncton, New Brunswick, was camping at Twin Shores campground, near Kensington. Sheppard's wife was asleep in their tent.

June 4, 2014. Late evening, around 11:30 by one account. Sheppard was putting out the bonfire when something over the water caught Sheppard's attention. A light. Diamond-shaped, dancing about 75 meters above the water and around a kilometre offshore. It flashed and flickered. Sheppard compared it to a dreidel or a spin top. It had no visible bottom, so it did not look like a ship. There was a hum in the air.

Sheppard watched for several minutes. Then the phone came out. About three minutes into the recording, a second light appeared. Later, Sheppard switched on a flashlight to see whether it changed anything. It did not. The video runs nearly eight minutes. Some accounts, including the Nighttime podcast notes, speak of 22 minutes captured, but the published footage is about eight.

The encounter left Sheppard quite rattled. For the next three nights Sheppard watched the same stretch of sky. The light never came back. No one else reported seeing it.

The footage went to MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. Its Canadian section opened Case 57090. Field investigator Geoff Genge closed it as an "Unknown". Investigators ran the sky through Stellarium, the open-source planetarium program, looking for satellites. Nothing fit. They checked flight schedules out of Charlottetown and Halifax for that night. A drone expert judged a drone unlikely, citing winds of about 20 km/h, battery life shorter than the sighting, and two lights at once.

MUFON ranked it among its top 10 sightings of 2014. About 18 months later, when MUFON reposted the case, CBC picked it up. "This is a really serious sighting," Stu Bundy, MUFON Canada assistant director, told the broadcaster, "and we still refer to it as one of the best UFO sightings in the Maritimes." Bundy added a caveat. "We could be wrong. Never say never."

The next day CBC ran a second story. A drone? A plane? Paul Gray, president of the Halifax chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, pointed to the 11:42 p.m. Air Canada flight approaching the airport on Îles-de-la-Madeleine. Its main runway, Gray said, lines up directly with the stretch of North Shore where Sheppard was filming. MUFON is not reported to have checked those flights.

Others had their own answers. Hugh McCormack, a former P.E.I. National Park worker, suggested parachute flares dropped by Canadian military aircraft. Ross Thompson, a cottage owner, recalled a similar light that turned out to be a large drone with multi-coloured lights, flown by a cottage renter. VICE writer Allison Tierney took aim at the coverage itself, arguing that the first CBC story leaned on Sheppard and a MUFON expert with no dissenting voices. Bundy stood firm, calling it "a very polarizing subject with many on both sides who believe they know the truth."

No one has accused Sheppard of inventing anything. The only question is what the camera caught. The Nighttime podcast brought Sheppard on to tell the story, with researcher and pilot Don Ledger weighing the theories. The case is Prince Edward Island's only entry on Wikipedia's list of Canadian sightings. MUFON still lists it as unknown. Two tiny specks of light over black water. No agreement on what they were.