First came a green fireball, now mysterious lights hovering over Arizona. What’s up?
Close encounters of the Arizona kind?
Sky watchers said a group of mysterious lights were seen hovering over Mesa, Arizona, on Sunday night, ABC 15 reported.
“It started moving kind of diagonal across, trying to figure out which way it was heading — and as it did, that’s when we started to notice it dropping things from it,” Kerri Burnett, who witnessed the lights with partner DJ Maier and shared video with ABC 15, told the TV station.
Others spotted the glowing orbs, too.
“It wasn’t just us,” Maier told ABC 15. “Our neighbors next door, they were out. They weren’t even filming. They were more in amazement, like statues, just sitting there watching it.”
Maier shared the video on Facebook looking for answers.
Arizona residents also reported seeing the strange lights around 7 p.m. the next day, including Jules Downing, who “said she saw eight or nine lights moving from north to south” Monday and a second viewer who “said she saw them in Avondale, and there were more like 15 lights. She said one of the lights moved out of the line and then went back in,” according to 3TV.
3TV reported that “the emerging theory is that they are SpaceX satellites. We’ve reached out to the company for confirmation.”
Aviation experts said the Sunday lights might have been military, helicopter or parachute flares, but the Federal Aviation Administration, Army National Guard and Luke Air Force Base representatives said they couldn’t tell what the lights were, according to ABC 15.
“I know what I saw, and I don’t think it was from here, and I think it was definitely something else,” Maier told the TV station.
Those sightings of unidentified flying objects come just days after Lucille Le Corre, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, shared video showing a green object streaking across the sky above Phoenix.
“Fireball last night near Phoenix seen from Tucson in this video acquired by my rooftop camera,” Le Corre said on Twitter.
Le Corre said the celestial event was recorded around 9:30 p.m. on Dec. 6 at her Tucson home.
The American Meteor Society defines a fireball as “a very bright meteor, generally brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky.”
Following Friday’s Phoenix fireball, the Arizona Republic described its impact on viewers this way: “Twitter blows up with reports of bright light streaking across Phoenix sky”
