Surely most of us would hit a restart button for the year 2020 if we would have one at our disposal. Fires burnt an estimated 18.6 million hectares from the Australian forests, the COVID-19 pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, and this could only be the beginning. Inhabitants from Australia had been terrified during the latest days about a mysterious UFO illuminating their night sky.
Therefore, are the aliens finally here? Have they come to take our lands and steal our secret for inventing the wheel? Are we living during the Bible’s Armageddon days? As you can see from the tweets below, the citizens are constantly wondering themselves what’s going on:
These lights flying through the air were seen from my family’s farm tonight north of Ballarat. Meteorite or space junk? Looks pretty cool whatever it is 😳👾👽 @theheraldsun @ballaratcourier #ballarat #smeaton pic.twitter.com/RqbB37VpIN
— Sophie Elsworth (@sophieelsworth) May 22, 2020
Just saw this meteor over Creswick towards Ballarat @WINNews_Bal @ballaratcourier @3AW693 pic.twitter.com/52gtSL33CD
— Tom Toose (@ttoose) May 22, 2020
What actually happened
Fortunately or not, there were no aliens this time. And we’re pretty sure that Armageddon has to wait a lot more from now. The culprits were actually some Russians. The fiery show was actually the outcome of a rocket that was used for launching a Russian satellite into orbit. The spacecraft was launched at 10:31 local time from Plesetsk, which means 1,000 kilometers away from Moscow.
Hi there, you saw the scheduled re-entry of the 3rd stage of russian Soyuz 2.1b orbital rocket.https://t.co/enwwMlu8rB
— NextLaunch (@Nextlaunch) May 22, 2020
Perry Vlahos, who is vice president of the Astronomical Society of Victoria, explained very well:
What gives it away as being a space junk [rather than a meteor or comet] is that it’s come in at a very shallow angle, so that means it world have been a very low Earth orbit and just re-entered the atmosphere and started burning because of friction,
Those numerous people who are clinging to any weird structure emerging on the sky in order to explain their apocalyptic scenarios will have to look for sources of inspiration elsewhere. Aliens traveling in advanced spacecraft surely must be somewhere in the Universe, but most probably, the distances are way too large for them to ever reach us. As for us, well… we should first lay foot on the nearest planet before considering to really search for aliens in space.
