“Wait, what the f*** is that?”
Julien Solomita finally managed to spit that out after two minutes of dumbfounded silence as he recorded an unidentified flying object from a rooftop parking lot in Van Nuys, California on Saturday night.
He had been gathering footage for his video blog when he noticed a strange light in the sky. The light flared several times before developing a tail that expanded into a purple cone. The object then radiated nebulous purple rings and burst into a bright white bullet at the front of a huge white cloud, through which a vivid blue streak trailed across the night sky. Afterward, Solomita said:
“For a brief moment, when the cloud got bigger, I was wondering, ‘Should we run?’ It looked so close.”
His video has been viewed over 6 million times on YouTube. And the phenomenon was seen as far north as San Francisco and as far inland as Utah. Photographer Abe Blair got pictures of it above the San Francisco skyline, with the Golden Gate Bridge and Sutro Tower in view. And Justin Majeczky managed to capture it with time-lapse photography from a similar vantage.
Social media exploded with reports of UFO, comet, or missile sightings.