Strange spirals of blue light in the New Zealand sky left people baffled this past Sunday night. "It looked like an enormous spiral galaxy, just hanging there in the sky, and slowly just drifting across...Quite an eerie feeling," said witness Alasdair Burns as reported in The Guardian.
Some of the initial theories posted on social media included an alien spaceship and even a wormhole leading to another galaxy. Rather than anything otherworldly, the explanation appears to be that the weird lights were caused by propellant ejection from the Globalstar satellite launch via a SpaceX rocket, which leaves a vapor trail.
The eerie lights brought back memories of the bizarre spiral lights seen over Norway in 2009, which were said to be due to a failed Russian missile.