TYLER, Texas (KLTV) – Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Probably not either but some people were left wondering about an object that was caught on camera in the sky Monday evening.
It was spotted around 5:30 p.m., just after sunset in Smith County: a glowing white dot in the sky. KLTV’s General Manager Pat Stacy was quick on the draw was able to capture video footage.
Director of TJC’s Earth and Space Science Center Beau Hartweg hadn’t heard about the object but began to develop theories after he was shown the footage.
“A potential fireball. It’s moving kind of slow across the sky for that to be it, but what often happens is, these objects, kind of space junk, space debris that’s passing through the atmosphere and as it does the friction passing through the gas of the atmosphere will cause it to heat up and glow,” Hartweg said.
The video is about a minute and half long and shows the object slowly fading away.
“It’s an interesting mystery. And that’s the cool thing about science is that we love a good mystery, right? And the fun thing about science is you try to figure out what it actually could be,” Hartweg said.
Hartweg took another look at the video and proposed another theory. He thought the glow could come from:
“The light kind of interacting with water vapor in the atmosphere,” Hartweg said.
So, a meteor? Space junk? Alien invasion? Rocketman?
“It could be any number of things. It’s hard to give you a kind of definitive answer based on this footage. But it is very intriguing,” Hartweg said.
Then he took a giant leap forward. He started poking around on the internet before finally arriving at a conclusion.
“This was a SpaceX Falcon rocket launch that we witnessed. Launched about 5:19 P.M. yesterday evening,” Hartweg said.
That’s 4:19 central time, but most likely, mystery solved. One small step at a time.
The rocket was launched out of Cape Canaveral Florida.
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