Bright Light Over New York Turns Out To Be Rocket

If you were outside in Upstate New York or anywhere along the East Coast late Tuesday night hoping to catch the Perseid meteor shower, you may have spotted something very different streaking through the sky.

Why New Yorkers Thought It Was a UFO

Around 10:30PM on Tuesday August 12th, social media started lighting up with posts from people claiming they’d just seen a UFO or an object hanging in the sky longer than a shooting star should. The whole thing looked straight out of a sci-fi movie.

"Saw a weird vortex looking object in the sky above Cooperstown, NY United States
I saw this in the (Probably) Northwestern sky at around 10:35 pm. I looked on other sources and it may have been a rocket body reentry. Any idea what this could be?"

The Truth: A Vulcan Centaur Rocket Launch

The glowing object was actually the Vulcan Centaur rocket from United Launch Alliance (ULA), launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, just before 9PM Tuesday. According to Space.com, this wasn’t just any rocket launch, it was carrying the first U.S. military experimental navigation satellite in nearly five decades.

Image credit ULA

Known as Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), it’s designed to help military and commercial systems resist jamming and spoofing, and it can even be reprogrammed while in orbit. Basically, it’s a high-tech, high-security upgrade to GPS.

Yahoo! News notes that this mission, called USSF-106, was the first National Security Space Launch aboard ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket. This rocket is a 202-foot-tall, 1.74-million-pound beast. Equipped with four side-mounted solid rocket boosters, Vulcan had enough power to send the payload directly into geosynchronous orbit, a journey of over 22,000 miles. This was one of ULA’s longest flights ever, lasting more than seven hours.

A Spectacle Visible for Hundreds of Miles

From the ground, though, all that technical brilliance translated into a glowing, slow-moving spectacle visible for hundreds of miles. For many in New York and beyond, it hung in the night sky in a way that didn’t look like a typical plane, meteor, or satellite.

So, while the truth may be less about little green men and more about national defense, you can’t blame folks for thinking they’d just had their own UFO encounter. And honestly? If the government was trying to keep this a secret, they probably wouldn’t have lit it up like the world’s biggest flashlight over the East Coast.

The Top 25 Most Baffling UFO Sightings Reported in New York This Year

When residents of the Empire State spot something unexplainable in the skies, they report it to the National UFO Reporting Center. There's been about 80 new sightings so far in 2023 that raised a few hackles.

NUFORC does investigate what people saw to determine if they actually witnessed alien activity or something else. Oftentime, these reports turn out to be false flags. For example; someone from NYC reported seeing a strange, square-like object in the sky on July 22. They provided a photo to NUFORC, who then ruled the person saw an "advertising banner behind a private aircraft."

However, there have been several creepy reports that couldn't be brushed off with a logical explanation. And some of these reports had photo or video evidence attached.

Scroll through New York's top 25 weirdest sightings of 2023.