Two days after people across the West Coast reported witnessing a mysterious streak of light shoot across the morning skies, there has still been no explanation, CBS San Francisco reported. While Bay Area residents saw the strange light around 6 a.m. Friday, the phenomenon was also reported in Oregon and Nevada.
About 30 residents witnessed a white light with fog or smoke billowing out, Claycord.com said. The incident immediately lit up social media, with many speculating on what the unusual event could have been, according to a report by NBC News.
"I am used to seeing planes early in the morning with lights, but this was different," one bystander told Claycord.com. "This had something coming out of it, it wasn't just the light. I could see it spraying something."
The light was also spotted by Barry Formslag of Novato.
"About 6 a.m. this morning, I came out, I was walking down the driveway and I looked up at the sky and saw this little orange ball - above the Redwood trees," Formslag told KPIX 5.
Bob Benjamin, a National Weather Service forecaster, said he had no idea what it could be.
"It's a rarity up here, but it could be the sun," Benjamin said humorously to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Turning serious, Benjamin said, "There's, as far as I know, no meteorological phenomena associated with that."
While astronomers have started researching the source light, there has been no confirmed explanation for the phenomenon two days on. A meteorite? A rocket launch? Contrails from a high-flying plane? Proof of extraterrestrial life?
"We don't have confirmation as to what it is just yet," said Autumn King, a spokeswoman for the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, according to SFGate.
"It may be space junk, it may be a meteor, but we have no confirmation yet," King said. "We're just kind of going off what we're getting from viewers and e-mail and video."
Since mosquito fogging in Contra Costa County isn't done by air, but by truck, and there were no plans to fog for mosquitoes in the area, that particular theory was shot down.
"Looking at the website of the American Meteor Society, it looks like there are several reports of a large bright object falling through the sky," Bing Quock of the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences told KPIX 5. "It's rather unusual in that this one had a rather large tail following behind it."
When asked if it's related to the upcoming solar storm, Quock said, "There's probably no relation between the two."
Gerald McKeegan of the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland also offered up his conclusions. "We're thinking maybe it was either a piece of space junk that has fallen out of orbit and into our atmosphere or it might have been some kind of a missile test launch," McKeegan said.
However, The U.S. Air Force, which conducts missile tests at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California, said there had been no missile launch on Friday morning.
Meanwhile, a recent Inquisitr report confirmed that California leads the United States when it comes to sheer number of UFO sightings being reported.
