What Was That Startling Flash Across the Oregon Sky?

Something strange lit up the skies of Oregon on the evening of March 25. Was the image captured on dozens of cell phones a meteor? Space debris? Or something more ominous?

Whatever the bizarre object was, hurtled brightly across the night sky over Oregon just after 9 p.m., drawing gasps of wonder and many posts to social media.

However, while the last few months have certainly given us an unprecedented number of unexplained aerial phenomena, as it turns out, this particular spectacular sight probably had quite a terrestrial origin.

A Local TV meteorologist dashed hopes of a witnessed alien encounter by explaining during the evening broadcast on KOIN 6 News that what people saw was most likely the second stage of the Falcon 9 that launched March 4. Chief Meteorologist Natasha Stenbock said all signs point to this, a tweet from @planet4589:

“The Falcon 9 second stage from the March 4 Starlink launch failed to make a deorbit burn and is now reentering after 22 days in orbit. Its reentry was observed from the Seattle area at about 0400 UTC March 26.”

Jim Todd with The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland agreed with Stenbock’s assessment.

“Definitely thought it was man-made because of how long it burned, how it broke apart, it had a boom associated with it. If it was a fireball, it would have been much faster,” Todd told KOIN 6 News. “It’s apparently from the Falcon 9, that March 4 launch, the second stage. Pretty classic man-made,” he continued.

Todd said it was pretty exciting that so many people spotted it. “Everyone around the Pacific Northwest got to see it.” He added that he was not sure if any of the debris made it to the ground that could be recovered to confirm this theory.

“Could there be debris? Certainly. But it was burning up.”

Rise in UFO Sightings

While this “UFO” sighting did seem to have a logical explanation, since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an unprecedented rise in “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

The Pentagon is under a mandate from the Senate Intelligence Committee to release a report on these increased sightings of “unexplained” or “advanced aircraft and drones” that have been reported by military personnel or captured by radar, satellites, and other surveillance systems by June 25. However, it was recently announced that the military would not meet that deadline, and the report will be delayed “indefinitely” due to what unnamed “government officials” have described as “stonewalling” by some military and spy agencies who are blocking or simply ignoring the effort to catalog what they have on “unidentified aerial phenomenon.”

The request for the report and the June 25 deadline was imposed after revelations in 2017 that the Pentagon was researching a series of unexplained intrusions into military airspace, including high-performance vehicles captured on video stalking Navy ships.

A spokesperson for Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, told POLITICO the report to Congress is in the works but declined to offer any further details on when it could be forthcoming. “We are aware of the requirement and will respond accordingly.”

Is this delay simply logistics and dealing with a ponderous government bureaucracy? Or is this yet another attempt by the government to hide what it knows to be the truth about aliens and UFOs?