Strange lights seen over the skies of Seattle Tuesday night have left some residents wondering whether they have seen a UFO.
Dozens of people took to Twitter to share footage of the unexplained lights, with many claiming it was evidence of extraterrestrial activity.
Several videos show the long thin line of lights moving quickly across the darkened sky. Social media users as far north as Vancouver, Canada also recorded clips of the flying objects.
What was this over Seattle tonight? @MorganKIRO7 #ufo #seattle pic.twitter.com/MLpGwWMxzi
— Heath Hinegardner (@trustheath) May 5, 2021
A user asked: ‘What did we just witness over the Seattle area?’
Another said: ‘This thing was silent, huge in scale (at least a few football fields?) and moving fast to the southeast.’
The person pondered whether it could be a UFO, ‘a secret black budget government craft’ or some sort of technology from SpaceX – the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk.
Indeed, many claimed the lights came from Starlink satellites, which are orbiting the Earth at present.
Starlink is a satellite internet constellation constructed by SpaceX, which orbits the Earth and provides broadband access. The constellation consists of mass-produced small satellites which orbit about the Earth and work in combination with a ground transceiver.
Jonathan McDowell, who work as an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, in Massachusetts took to social media saying that the lights certainly came from Starlink satellites.
’60 Starlink satellites were launched from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday afternoon. On their 7th orbit of the Earth they passed southeast over Seattle and central Idaho, at around 9.20-9.30pm Pacific Daylight Time, along the track shown here,’ he wrote above a map.
‘So if you live in that area and saw a ‘string-of-pearls’ in the sky around that time, that was the Starlink sats, still close together after being deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket.’
Last year, astronomers complained that the Starlink satellites were too bright in the sky and ruin their uninterrupted views of the night sky.
Musk promised to ‘fix’ the brightness of the satellites in an April 2020 Twitter post, responding to a user who asked: ‘
According to a report published in Vox last week, astronomers are still asserting that the satellites are too bright.
‘The effect of the satellite constellations is like painting graffiti on a World Heritage Site. But not just graffiti in one particular location — graffiti that can be seen the world over,’ the report stated.