The unusual celestial sight appeared under New Jercy sky last Saturday, and most of the people thought it was some kind of UFO thing. But guess what? It was actually Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.
On a Friday night, lights move in a perfectly linear alignment, sparking hopes of an encounter with an alien spacecraft. This event coincided with ongoing congressional hearings regarding unidentified flying objects.
However, the source of this phenomenon turned out to be much more down-to-earth. Elon Musk’s SpaceX clarified that the lights were, in fact, Starlink satellites passing over the region. These satellites had been launched from Cape Canaveral the previous Friday.
“This was the fifth flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Crew-6, SES O3b mPOWER.”
SpaceX
Interestingly, this was not the first instance where a mysterious occurrence in the night sky was attributed to Starlink satellites.
Falcon 9 launches 22 @Starlink satellites to orbit from Florida, completing SpaceX's 65th launch of the year pic.twitter.com/tv0PcfeV0s
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 16, 2023
Earlier in the year, researchers from the University of Vermont and the Center for UFO Studies had linked an increase in UFO sightings to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite launches during the COVID-19 pandemic. But then found that pandemic-induced boredom led more people to explore the night sky, resulting in a surge of over 600 reported sightings in 2020.
However, this surge coincided with the deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
The study concluded that SpaceX was the primary cause of the increase in UFO reports. When sightings associated with Starlink satellites were excluded from the data. And there was no significant rise in UFO sightings between 2020 and 2019.
SpaceX currently maintains a constellation of over 3,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, making it the largest such constellation in existence.
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