Mysterious lights in night sky baffle Hawaii residents. ‘What in the world is this?’

Mysterious lights flying across the night sky over the weekend baffled Hawaii residents.

While social media was abuzz with speculation of UFOs, scientists think they know what’s responsible.

Kuuipo Kanawaliwali captured video of the lights as they passed under the moon on Saturday night.

“I started videotaping and when they got closer,” Kanawaliwali told KHON, “I start freaking out because I’m like, ‘Oh, what in the world is this?’”

Sheri English also captured video of the lights as they sailed overhead.

“We didn’t know what it was, where it came from,” English told KHON. “It just appeared. It was actually (a) very eerie, eerie feeling.”

John O’Meara, the chief scientist at W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, says the lights were from a Chinese rocket booster used to launch a Venezuelan communications satellite in 2008, Maui Now reported.

“That booster has been orbiting around the Earth, but its orbit has been decaying and eventually decayed enough to get slowed down by the atmosphere and reentered in over the Pacific,” O’Meara told the news outlet. “Space junk falls in all the time. Usually it doesn’t make such a great light show, but in this case we were lucky.”

This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 3:51 PM with the headline "Mysterious lights in night sky baffle Hawaii residents. ‘What in the world is this?’."