In an eerie moment captured on camera, bright lights were seen over Hawaii, a state of the United States, as experts claimed that it was a rocket launched by China over 12 years ago.
According to local media reports, scientists in Hawaii say bright lights seen over Honolulu were likely the remnants of a rocket booster from nearly 12 years ago.
The Venesat-1 was launched on a Chinese carrier rocket on October 29, 2008, but it has been out of service since March 2020.
The moment was witnessed by several people on the different islands, who saw these lights in the sky shortly after 10 pm on Saturday.
An eye witness while narrating the moments said: “I started videotaping, and when they got closer, I start freaking out because I’m like, ‘Oh, what in the world is this?’”.
“We actually didn’t even know what to think. We didn’t know what it was, where it came from,” said Sheri English, who also lives on Molokai. “It just appeared. It was actually very eerie, eerie feeling.”
Experts from the Mauna Kea observatories offered an explanation of the bright lights.
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“So in all likelihood, what they saw last night was the reentry of a rocket booster that was from a rocket that was launched in 2008 … a Chinese rocket that was boosting up a communication satellite for Venezuela,” Chief Scientist John O’Meara, of the W. M. Keck Observatory, told local Hawaii media.
Over the past 12 years, the rocket booster decayed. Astronomers found a map of the object’s flight path, which was near Hawaii.
“So we can’t be 100 percent certain because we don’t have any of the pieces of the debris. But the pattern of the lights that we saw in our timelapse combined with this map,” said Canada France Hawaii Telescope Strategic Communications Director Mary Beth Laychak.
