Over last weekend many residents in the East Liberty County area of Texas reported to 911 the sighting of strange lights in the sky and many people took the strange lights to be Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO). Now the mystery of the UFOs has been resolved.
At around 8:30 p.m. Saturday, March 24, residents spotted a series of red fireballs in the sky and police received around a dozen calls regarding the unidentified lights. However, later on, the police found that the floating lights were actually paper lanterns released after a wedding ceremony.
Police sources said the locals who called 911 said that they saw four orange lights moving slowly in a line high up in the sky. Police scopes revealed that the objects looked like hot air balloons — complete with flames — but were much smaller and did not have the signature gondola at the bottom.
The lights were estimated to only be a few thousand feet off the ground, and yet they moved silently. Within minutes the UFOs were gone, having disappeared into the night. They didn't fly away but instead simply blinked out of existence. No known airplane or helicopter technology could fly that low and remain so quiet.
A second batch of the strange lights soon appeared, in an identical line and in a more or less identical formation, until they too vanished in the same pattern. Local police also contacted the National Weather Bureau, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies, and none of the agencies could explain the mystery of the "UFOs."
However, members of a nearby wedding party informed the police that the floating, flaming objects were paper lanterns lit just after their wedding ceremony.
"Such Chinese lanterns are made of lightweight paper and a candle that provides the heat that lifts the lanterns as well as the light that makes them glow. That explains why there was no aircraft engine sound, and the flamelike appearance. Each lantern represented a wish made by each of the guests for the new couple," reports NBCNews.
This is not the first time that paper lanterns have been mistaken as UFOs. In October 2011, over a dozen strange lights were seen in the night skies over northern Utah. The UFOs had a strange fiery red light and were moving at an estimated speed of about 70 mph (113 km/h). The mystery was solved when students at a local high school mentioned they had launched 16 paper lanterns, just before the sightings occurred, as part of a ceremony.
Lights in dark skies can be easily mistaken or misinterpreted as UFOs. Have you come across any such incident?
