People shocked after spotting mysterious bright objects streaking across sky
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Featured Image Credit: NBC2/Jeffery Berry
People over in Florida were left baffled and amazed after getting an unexpected light show in the early hours of the morning.
Before sunrise on Thursday, March 23, as residents of Southwest Florida started rising and preparing for their days, a stream of orange-hued lights was spotted travelling through the sky.
It's not the first thing you'd expect to see with your morning coffee.
After watching the clip, posted by Jeffery Berry and shared by meteorologist Jim Dickey, you'll understand why some people might assume they'd just witnessed some sort of UFO.
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NBC2 explains that the cluster of lights are too close together to be meteors and too far away to be planes, with Dickey describing them as 'fireballs'.
Taking to Twitter, he wrote: "We've received a number of reports and videos of multiple fireballs in the sky over SWFL this morning just before 5AM.
"This video is from Fort Myers sent in by viewer Jeffery Berry."
The online community were on hand to crack jokes about the sighting, with one writing: "That was Chuck Norris playing catch with the International Space Station."
Another quipped: "Leftovers from the Pitbull concert."
But as is often the case with these occurrences, there's a very reasonable explanation behind the natural fireworks show.
We know this thanks to astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who said they were actually remnants of a rocket that launched into space this week as they reentered the earth's atmosphere.
He wrote on Twitter: "The fourth stage rocket from the Mar 22 KZ-1A launch made a post-deployment burn to lower perigee to only 114 km, leading to an (uncontrolled) reentry over Florida only a day later at 0837 UTC."
McDowell also posted a link to the Fireball Reports website, which shows a number of reports made in Florida on that date.
Although it's good to know that the sighting wasn't an alien invasion, the idea of rocket fragments blazing their way through the sky hasn't exactly left residents feeling great.
But experts have reassured that the chances of space debris making it through the atmosphere and hitting a human are incredibly low.
And the online community were on hand to point this out.
"Oh dear. It's there a chance of hitting populated areas?" asked one under the tweet, to which another replied, "It's a tiny fourth stage of a 30t rocket; it won't have much left to reach the ground."
This is something McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics, previously spoke about.
After a concerned commenter asked about a reentry predicted for 2021, he said: "If you are standing in the wrong square meter of Earth of the 250 trillion square meters that its debris might hit, then you are in trouble.
"Otherwise, relax."
