A video of what appears to be an object trailing a dark spiralling plume behind it and plummeting toward Prince Edward Island's Northumberland Strait is the focus of intense speculation.

A P.E.I. couple captured the strange event on video on Dec. 26, but witnesses and experts alike aren't certain what they're observing.

"We were kind of dumbfounded," said Tony Quigley, the P.E.I. farmer who videotaped the apparent unidentified flying object with his wife, Marie Ford-Quigley.

The couple was out walking late in the afternoon near North Tryon on the island's west end when Mr. Quigley spotted the mysterious object. "I said to Marie, 'Look, there's a plane in trouble there.' It looked like smoke coming from it."

The couple taped the strange scene for nearly six minutes. Mr. Quigley estimates the object they saw was more than three kilometres high and is convinced that the UFO must have crashed in the strait or in New Brunswick.

They watched the spectacle for close to 30 minutes and received calls from neighbours who also witnessed it.

"I really didn't want to be looking forward to hearing that there was a plane crashing around the area and people losing their lives on Boxing Day," Mr. Quigley said.

But calls the next day to the area's airport, Summerside RCMP and the federal Transportation Safety Board came up with no reports of plane crashes.

Ms. Ford-Quigley speculates it might have been a fighter jet dumping fuel and in trouble. One thing's for sure: her husband isn't buying any stories about crashing flying saucers.

"This is definitely unidentified," Mr. Quigley said. "But if you're talking Martians or anything like that, I haven't seen any to date, so I can't say I really believe in them."

That's not the case with Gertrude Campbell. The Quigleys' neighbour also saw the UFO, along with four other people. Ms. Campbell, 65, firmly believes in UFOs.

"I swear when I come (home) at night time and I look at some of those stars and they're pretty big, I'd say that's what's looking over us," she said. But if the P.E.I. object was a saucer, then according to Ms. Campbell: "It broke up coming down."

Don Ledger, a UFO researcher and author who lives in Bridgewater, N.S., believes the object was space junk. He cites the launch in mid-December of a NASA Atlas rocket carrying a satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that co-ordinates spy satellites south of the border.

"Supposedly the booster came down around southwestern Nova Scotia," said Mr. Ledger, who co-wrote with Chris Styles, Dark Object, a book about a purported UFO crash at Shag Harbour, N.S., in 1967.

"That (NASA booster) didn't make orbit the way it was supposed to, but I can't prove it.

"After a certain point in its launch, everything goes what they call dark at NASA and it turns over to the spooks down there in the U.S. who handle the satellites. So if indeed it did come down, you're not going to hear about it."

The Quigleys are sending their video to Ufology Research of Manitoba in Winnipeg, in hopes that the private, non-profit group can help solve the mystery.