Lights in the sky
At first Dave Fischer thought he was seeing things.
Fischer lives near Gilman in Western Taylor County and happened to look out the window at 3 a.m. one night last week and saw a line of lights moving in the early morning sky.
Lights in the sky are nothing unusual and most can be explained as being perfectly natural phenomena such as meteors or even the lights from overnight flights. What is unusual is to see a perfect line of these lights moving in a graceful and unhurried path across the sky.
While he was fairly confident that Wisconsin was not being visited by visitors from beyond the stars, in a world where Murder Hornets are a thing, it pays to be at least a little cautious. After all, the big black helicopters flying around a few years back, ended up being real, but were for mineral prospecting — or at least that is the story they are sticking with.
Fischer waited until daylight and contacted his daughter, Amanda Warner, who contacted us at The Star News on social media to see if we had any insight on what was going on.
She said, “Towards the direction of Medford, he reported a long line of lights in the sky, maybe 20-30 lights. Very bright, white, in a diagonal line, higher on the left (north) and lower on the right (south), but definitely in the sky.
As he observed them, they moved eastward and 3-4 lights disappeared (blinked out) from the left side of the line. He watched them recede as they moved away eastward.
He is VERY sure of what he saw and called me across the country asking me to post this and see if anyone else saw anything at that time.
So. Any night owls in the group who might have seen something early this morning (Wednesday)?”
Digging into it a little bit, and it seems that eccentric billionaire Elon Musk is to blame for the lights in the skies. The lights were part of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites array. They were part of the most recent group of Starlink satellites launched in early May.
The long line of satellites that many across Wisconsin saw in the sky last week are part of a bigger project that will put about 2,500 of the devices in orbit. The goal of the satellites is to provide broadband internet anywhere on earth. Theoretically, when the system goes fully operational, you will be able to stream your videos from your cabin in the back beyond in the middle of the national forest just as well as you can from home in the city of Medford.
Tom Rasmussen of TCR Solutions in Medford has been beta testing the system for the past several months and says that so far it has lived up to the promises even in heavy snow and rain conditions.
While some stargazers are less than fond of the idea of more space junk cluttering the sky, I worry about sinister motives. After all, once we become complacent about long lines of lights moving like highways in the sky, the less likely we will be to get worked up when those lights make a direct path to Lublin. I can only hope that whomever’s door the aliens knock on they are shown the hospitality the area is famous for and that intergalactic travelers recognize what a treat it is to get homemade sauerkraut and pierogis. *** It was with a sense of relief on Saturday morning that I drove my son Alex over to the Marshfield Clinic Dental Center for a COVID-19 vaccination clinic last week, regulators had cleared the Pfizer vaccine for people ages 12 and up and Alex wanted to be first in line in Taylor County to get the shot.
For Alex, the major plus of the vaccination, beyond protecting against serious complications from the virus, is that it is one more step toward having a normal high school life. Alex, like many other students, would hold their breath as a list of names were read off to report to the office because they were contact traced and would be put on quarantine. Getting vaccinated eliminates the chances of being quarantined and lets him worry about more normal sources of teenage angst and less about if his life will be turned upside down because he stood too close to someone in science class.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.
