The Starlink Satellite Train UFO Reports: Netherlands, Montana and Ontario

SpaceX launched its first batch of 60 Starlink internet satellites on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral. In the US it was the evening of 23 May 2019. According to AFP, it was about 02:30 GMT on Friday 24 May. Freshly released, the satellites stayed bunched together. They flew low, reported at about 440 km, before they would raise their orbits with ion thrusters. And they caught the sunlight while the ground below was dark.

Leiden. 24 May 2019, about 22:55 UT. Satellite tracker Marco Langbroek had his low-light camera trained on the sky. First came two faint, flashing objects. A few tens of seconds later, the train entered the field of view. He counted at least 56 objects. "I could not help shouting 'OAAAAAH!!!!'" he wrote.

Across the Netherlands, the public saw it with no warning. Passes came shortly before 1:00 and again around 2:30 local time on 25 May. "We suddenly saw a long string of dozens of lights," a resident of Maarsbergen told NOS. "It wasn't a meteor, as it remained visible for minutes." Another observer told AFP: "There's a long line of lights. Faster than a plane. Huh?" In The Hague, someone asked: "Is it Russia attacking the US? Are they UFOs? Seriously, I didn't know."

At 01:05 in Landgraaf, a witness and a friend watched 10 lights heading west for about a minute. "It looked as though a train was driving through the sky," the report read. "I tried to record it but unfortunately couldn't." UFO Meldpunt Nederland received more than 150 reports. Its Belgian counterpart received 33. Dutch media gave it a name. The "Ufo-treintje". The little UFO train.

The launches continued. So did the reports. On Christmas evening 2019, people in Browning and Rocky Boy in northern Montana sent KRTV photos of "a row of bright lights in the sky". Later, near Kelly Island west of Missoula, Kara Baszler and her husband were looking at the night sky when they noticed the lights.

On 19 September 2023, an Instagram video of a train over Mississauga, Ontario drew a flood of comments. "Is it shooting stars?" one asked. Another was certain: "It has to be aliens, what else can it be?"

There was never much of a mystery. UFO Meldpunt Nederland attributed the wave to "the Starlink satellite launch by SpaceX". NOS noted that the satellites "will eventually separate; brightness will decrease over time." In Belgium, the Starlink pass and an Irish weather balloon over Ghent pushed reports to 266 in 2019, up from 182 the year before.

Astronomers had their own concerns. Northwestern astronomer Cliff Johnson called the satellites "more of an annoyance than a real problem" for now. The International Astronomical Union urged coordination with astronomers. Elon Musk said he had told teams to reduce the satellites' reflectivity.

The Starlink train became a modern template for mass misidentification. It sits alongside the "space jellyfish" of rocket launch plumes and the 1913 Great Meteor Procession, another train of lights at constant speed. In its FY2024 annual report, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) traced a commercial pilot's sighting of white flashing lights to a Starlink launch about one hour earlier. AARO wrote that it "increasingly receives cases that it is able to resolve to the Starlink satellite constellation."