A series of mysterious lights spotted above the Texas skyline Saturday night have UFO watchers wanting to believe. Videos widely shared on social media depict an object entering Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrating, leaving behind a series of spectacular fiery trails.
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🚨#BREAKING: Thousands of witnesses across the Southwest are reporting an unknown object breaking apart in the sky creating a spectacular display
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) November 10, 2024
⁰📌#Unitedstates | #USA
Currently, thousands of people across the Southwest, particularly in Oklahoma and Texas, are witnessing… pic.twitter.com/VU0TRxVOPX
Of course, armchair experts across the internet weighed in on what those streaks across the Texas skyline could be.
“It’s aliens. they’re coming,’ one denizen of X speculated. “The UFO hearings in congress are this week too!” another X user pointed out.
Meanwhile, another X user likened the footage to a supernatural meaning.
“Funny because I was literally just recording a Bible sermon about Genesis Chapter 19, which depicts God destroying the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah using “brimstone and fire” that appears in the sky and impacts the cities, obliterating them and anything nearby…” they wrote.
The Likely Explanation for the UFO Sightings Over Texas
However, other X users pointed out that the footage lines up with another, more mundane, event.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell gave a straightforward explanation for the phenomena after spotting the footage on X.
“If it was around 10:03 pm CST, then it’s Starlink 4682, which reentered over the region then,” McDowell pointed out. “It was expected to reenter somewhere on Earth sometime that day. But we can’t predict the location in advance,” he added in a follow-up post.
“I guess Elon will let us know soon,” one user quipped. “Original Starlink satellites were only designed to stay in orbit for up to 5 years. So this may likely become a very common occurrence,” another user speculated.
Indeed, meteorologists at WFAA in Dallas suggest that Saturday night’s Texas spectacle was more likely the result of space debris rather than a traditional meteor shower (…or UFO).
According to NASA, our planet’s Low Earth Orbit is now regarded as the world’s largest garbage dump, with an astonishing 6,000 tons of debris. This swirling mass of waste does not even account for the thousands of operational satellites orbiting the Earth. Recently, SpaceX’s Elon Musk announced plans to launch an additional 30,000 satellites, further complicating the issue.