A mother and daughter who live on a ranch just outside of Nanton are scratching their heads after a couple of unidentified flying objects flew over their southern Alberta home late last Sunday night.

Sam Martine says she and her daughter were watching TV when they saw two bright lights hovering over a field less than a kilometre away from their home.

Strange lights in the sky over a ranch near Nanton have Sam Martine and her daughter Baylie wondering exactly what it was they saw last Sunday night. (Tim Devlin/CBC)

Martine says when they went out on the porch for a closer look the lights quickly flew towards them, spooking their cattle.

"Then the light just started coming straight at us and it went straight over our house and headed to the northwest behind us," said Martine. "I've never seen anything like that before."

Martine's 14-year-old daughter Baylie tried to take a picture of the objects with her cellphone, but said the camera was acting weird.

"The picture went completely green and later on that night it ended up deleting itself."

Sam Martine was able to get her DSLR camera working, but only got a few photos. They are still not sure what they saw but the story is getting plenty of attention on the internet.

Chris Rutkowski, a science writer who studies UFO reports in Canada, believes there may be a simple explanation.

UFO sightings quite common in Alberta

"The tip offs are the red and blue lights, which are very common in aircraft," said Rutkowski.

Robyn Foret, chair of the education and public outreach committee with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, agrees.

He says whatever the pair saw probably wasn't related to paranormal activity.

"The shaking of the object or the movement of the object — that looks like a camera with a time exposure that may have been bumped. It looked very sporadic."

While experts aren't convinced this is a UFO, they say sightings in Alberta are quite common.

According to the Canadian UFO Survey, which is co-authored by Rutkowski, there were 1180 sightings in 2013 and more than a hundred of those sightings happened in Alberta.

And this isn't the first time paranormal activity has been reported in Nanton.

"There was a video taken of three lights moving in the sky where three lights were fading and reappearing for quite some time ... also in March — March 29 of 2004 [at] about 9:30 in the evening," said Rutkowski.