Stargazers have been left mystified after a “fireball” was spotted streaking across the night sky over San Diego, California with both experts and amateurs left perplexed.
The mysterious streak was spotted on Monday night and could be seen from a number of locations around the city with one resident telling NBC that the stream of light “began as a single blur then expanded into a straight line” before vanishing.
Another onlooker described the sight as being like a “strange aircraft with lights on bottom.”
Even the experts couldn’t pin down what exactly it was that flew across the sky.
Earlier this month NASA issued a statement stating that the annual Perseid meteor shower would be occurring during August.
Perseid meteors, which are trails of debris left behind by an ancient comet, travel at a whopping 132,000 miles per hour (59 kilometers per second). At that speed “even a smidgen of dust makes a vivid streak of light when it collides with Earth’s atmosphere,” according to NASA.
Steve Flanders from California’s Palomar Observatory told NBC, however, that it’s unlikely to be a Perseid meteor as they would “move across the sky far more quickly than in this case.”
While hard to decipher what was caught on video, Flanders said he believed the light’s “tail looks like the flames that escape from a rocket engine during ascent.”
While the the USS Makin Island group are training in the area, a spokesperson for the Navy confirmed to Fox5 that no “live fire” exercises were taking place at the time of the reports.