Houstonians looking up at the night sky yesterday might have thought they had a close encounter when they observed a series of odd lights and smoke rings, except it turns out, the spectacle was all human-made courtesy of SpaceX. Residents from Southeast Texas to the Brazos Valley, who saw the light show around 8:45 p.m., initially wondered if they had spied a falling star, a comet, perhaps even extraterrestrial visitors, but the mystery was soon solved.

As reported by the Houston Chronicle, what appeared to be an atmospheric anomaly was identified as the aftereffects of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which had blast off earlier to deploy Starlink satellites from a launch pad in Florida, the light show was simply a deorbit burn that happened before the rocket made its splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. KHOU 11, inundated with reports from puzzled viewers, confirmed that the unusual aerial display was not a celestial event but SpaceX's latest foray into expanding its broadband internet network.

While some locals captured the fleeting moment on camera, narratives and descriptions of the event filled social media feeds, with onlookers in Richmond and near Scarsdale and Beamer recounting their sightings of the streaking light in the dark sky. KHOU 11 relayed to their audience that the dramatic display was just the rocket's journey over Texas during its assigned mission path.

Easing the minds of those who might have read more into the visual phenomenon, Eric Berger of Space City Weather explained the scientific cause behind the spectacle, attributing the ring formation to the Falcon 9 "performing a deorbit burn" a process that is customary for rocket descents but can sometimes produce stunning visual effects when the conditions are right, this wasn't something out of a science fiction movie, it was standard rocket science.