Alien Lights: Mysterious-looking light pillars have appeared in the night sky (Watch)

A father captured stunning images of a rare natural phenomenon which makes it look as though multicoloured laser beams are shooting down from the sky.

The extraordinary images were taken in Ontario by Timmy Joe Elzinga using his smartphone camera.

Elzinga was woken up on the early morning of January 6 by his son, Gibson, when he saw this crazy light show going on, which he described as “beams of light flashing in the sky”.

“I was freaking out,” Elzinga said. “My wife came and took a look at it, but I had to investigate further. I opened the bathroom window and even took the screen out so I could get those images.”

As Elzinga relates in a video posted to his YouTube channel, the light show was misleading.

“I got trolled by nature,” he jokes in his video, explaining that what he thought was the Northern Lights turned out to be something called light pillars, beams of light refracted through tiny ice crystals.

It was -18 Celsius (-0.4 Fahrenheit) and the middle of the night, but even so, other neighbors were out staring at the phenomenon as well.

Elzinga, a Star Trek fan, compared the lights to that show’s transporter beams, as well as the famed Bat-signal.

Reaction to his video, and the still photos he shot with his cell phone and shared on Imgur, has been “pretty amazing,” Elzinga said.

Some people were even “kind of sad” to learn there was a science behind the majestic-looking sight. “One woman commented she wished it was supernatural and unexplainable,” he said.

Agencies/Canadajournal