© Facebook/Elizabeth Withnall
Last weekend was the night sky over the area Yukon in Alaska a mysterious one light spiral to see. Several people had observed the spectacle and posted pictures of it online. “We had no idea what was going on there,” says the Yukon resident Talia MacDonaldwho watched the spiral from the Dempster Highway in the early hours of Sunday morning.
For a moment, she and her partners thought they were seeing a UFO or something. “It was a bit spooky because we were the only ones on the highway,” she says to CBC. The light blue spiral seemed to glow brighter for a moment before disappearing altogether. MacDonald estimates she was seen for about 2 minutes.
Also the Aurora Borealis enthusiast Elizabeth Withnall posted pictures of the spiral on Facebook.
SpaceX rocket fuel
What has confused several people in this region is for the physicist Don Hampton of the University of Alaska easy to explain. According to him, the phenomenon is a cloud of unused fuel a SpaceX-Rockets. Under the right conditions, this vapor becomes visible.
Hampton was briefed on the spiral by several people the day after the sky spectacle. He later saw the recordings himself on the University Aurora Camera. “I’ve seen some of these before, so I figured it must have been a launch,” he says. Shortly thereafter, he found out that just a few hours earlier, a SpaceX rocket had been launched in California.
