New Jersey residents were spooked when they saw Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites flying over the Garden State as the aerospace company launched its latest batch of devices into orbit.
Stargazers were baffled on Saturday night when they saw dozens of lights rising in a perfectly linear position overhead, believing extraterrestrial UFOs could be to blame.
Social media was ablaze with hopes that extraterrestrial objects had decided to cross over New Jersey, immediately after the latest round of congressional hearings on flying saucers.
The sightings in New Jersey, however, were much more mundane.
SpaceX revealed that the lights were just Starlink satellites passing over the area after their launch from Cape Canaveral on Friday night.
“This was the fifth flight of the first-stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Crew-6, SES O3b mPOWER,” according to SpaceX.
Many confused the lights with a possible UFO sighting in the Garden State.TikTok/@tormentandblasted
This is not the first time that an anomaly in the night sky turns out to be a Starlink satellite.
Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Vermont and the Center for UFO Studies found that Musk’s SpaceX was responsible for a spike in UFO sightings since the pandemic began.
Initially, researchers believed that pandemic boredom caused more people to investigate the night sky and report more than 600 sightings than usual in 2020. But the cases coincided with SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
The lights, however, turned out to be Starlink satellites launched the day before. Twitter/@IAmYhoshuaAdama
SpaceX has more than 3,000 satellites orbiting Earth. AFP via Getty Images
The company launched dozens of satellites into orbit in May 2019 to provide internet coverage to 50 countries around the world, and UFO reports increased around the same time.
The study suggested that SpaceX was solely responsible for the increase and concluded that when reports linked to Starlink satellites were removed, “there was no increase in sightings in 2020 compared to 2019.”
SpaceX has more than 3,000 satellites orbiting Earth, many of them easily visible and currently making up the largest low-orbit constellation in the sky.
Satellites are likely to cause more confusion in the future, as SpaceX aims to have more than 10,000 satellites in the sky by 2027.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn