(Photo courtesy Timmy Joe Elzinga)

What's the story with these eerie beams of light spotted in Ontario, Canada? They're not the Northern Lights or extra-terrestrial beings descending upon us -- but a mesmerizing side effect of artificial light.

On Friday, Jan. 6 at 1:30 a.m., Timmy Joe Elzinga was caring for his toddler when he noticed the light pillars outside.

"Basically, I was awoken by my two-year-old child," Elzinga said. "I soothed him and went to the bathroom and that's when I first saw the beams of light flashing in the sky. I was freaking out."

Elzinga did some researching and discovered the eerie beams of light are documented as. They're a phenomenon caused by artificial or natural light reflecting off of ice. In colder areas, the beams appear closer to the ground.

"I thought they were the Northern Lights at first but I quickly realized this was something a lot more localized to my area," Elzinga said. "The beams seemed to be coming from the ground in a lot of spots."

The father and captured the amazing red, green and blue beams of light on his smartphone. But when he drove away from his home and towards a nearby summit to take more photographs, he came up empty-handed.

"I was totally wrong," Elzinga explained in his video. "I get to the top of the hill and there's no more lights really."

In this case, the beams were a positive result of artificial light pollution.

"It was really cool," Elzinga said. "There's different traffic lights, and the street lights go on and off...and there's a bunch of businesses with neon signs over there. They [the lights] were all different colors and they kind of danced about in the sky. It was pretty neat."