Mind-boggling blue swirls have been appearing in the New Zealand sky over the weekend.
Locals were utterly confounded by the bizarre sightings, which took place on Sunday, June 19, over Nelson. By 7:30PM, they'd travelled 750km south to Stewart Island.
Locals took to Twitter to share snaps of the baffling apparitions, and speculate as to what might have caused them.
"Crazy moving spiral over nelson NZ tonight! Think my kids summoned a portal! Arghh," wrote one confused parent, while another person thought that the mysterious spirals might be a sign of extraterrestrial life. "They are coming..." they tweeted.
Another questioned whether a secret New Zealand space agency might be behind the lights, tweeting: "Hey space twitter, rocket twitter and all other spitters. These photos were taken from Motueka and Queenstown gardens tonight at 7:30pm - do we have another space agency in NZ apart from Rocket Lab?"
Meanwhile, a third theorized the spirals might have something to do with Elon Musk's space exploration company.
"Any ideas what it is? Some speculating it's got something to do with SpaceX," they tweeted.
It turned out that Musk was behind the blue spirals, which were reportedly caused when SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Globalstar DM15 satellites into orbit.
"SpaceX hauled a Globalstar communications satellite into orbit early Sunday from Cape Canaveral, pulling off the third Falcon 9 rocket flight in 36 hours, the fastest sequence of three missions by any commercial launch company in history," Spaceflight Now tweeted.
As for why the rocket launch created spirals to appear in the night sky, the New Plymouth Astrological Society said in a Facebook post that what people were actually seeing was a "fuel dump" or "exhaust plume" from the spacecraft as it launched.
"The 'spiral' that was seen in the sky tonight around 7:30 PM was most likely a 'fuel dump' or 'exhaust plume' from a SpaceX rocket launch," they explained in the Facebook post.
"Similar effects have been seen before, and SpaceX's Globalstar 2 FM15 was likely to have passed New Zealand around that time," the Astrological Society added.
