People in the Pacific Northwest were treated to quite a light show in the sky on Thursday night shortly before 9:00 p.m. local time, midnight ET. Social media users from Oregon to Canada reported seeing strange lights, and we have plenty of angles from last night’s display that have been uploaded to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
Was it a meteor shower? Space debris burning up in the atmosphere? Could it be aliens in flying saucers finally coming to harvest humans for our vitamins? Despite all the buzz about UFO sightings in recent years, that last one is, sadly, pretty unlikely.
Whatever it was, people couldn’t believe their eyes, as you can hear in the videos below. And while there’s speculation from astronomers that the lights streaking across the sky were pieces of the second stage boosters from a Falcon 9 rocket that was carrying SpaceX Starlink satellites, there’s still no official word from Elon Musk’s space company. Musk seems preoccupied fighting with The Onion right now.
This video was posted to YouTube showing the spectacle somewhere over Washington state.
People in Vancouver, Washington also got quite the view last night.
Another view near the Seattle airport captured the light show from an interesting distance.
There’s this video from YouTube, where the poster speculated it might be aliens.
And from Everett, Washington there was this video on YouTube.
Some people captured the light show from their cars.
This video becomes blurry in points but shows pretty well that there were multiple distinct objects in the sky, whatever they were.
People could see it in Renton, Washington.
Another video from the Seattle area gives a great perspective on just how long the light streaks were.
Further south, in Portland, the slight streaks looked to have much longer tails.
Other Oregonians captured the spectacle from their cars as well.
Again, the view from Oregon and the Portland area seemed to be even brighter than from Seattle for some reason.
Some angles from Portland even gave it a more alien-looking appearance.
Other videos seemed to give an abstract quality to the light.
And this was the view from Newport, Oregon.
Again, the best explanation we’ve heard so far has been that a Space X Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage was reentering and burning up after 22 days in orbit. But that hasn’t been confirmed just yet.
The Falcon 9 second stage from the Mar 4 Starlink launch failed to make a deorbit burn and is now reentering after 22 days in orbit. Its reentry was observed from the Seattle area at about 0400 UTC Mar 26. pic.twitter.com/FQrBrUoBHh
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) March 26, 2021
Sadly, probably not aliens.