By Tim Binnall
Travelers on an overpass in China were stopped in their tracks when they spotted what appeared to be an eerie pillar of light that mysteriously appeared in the sky. The strange scene reportedly unfolded in the city of Shenyang earlier this week and was captured on film by a bewildered witness. In the video, a sizeable beam of light can be seen looming over a building below while people who noticed the peculiar sight stopped their bicycles to take pictures of the odd vision.
Alas, while some imaginative viewers may wonder if the weird pillar of light is some kind of portal to another dimension, it would appear that the puzzling anomaly has a more prosaic explanation. It turns out that the 'beam' is almost certainly a reflection of the sun hitting a building. A local meteorologist Xia Chuandong explained that thick clouds in the area largely obscured the structure and water vapor in the air amplified the light. This reasoning is borne out by fastidious UFO researcher Scott Brando, who produced a comparative video which can be seen below.