Mysterious Bright Flash of Light Over Kyiv Sparks Wave of Theories

Speculation has followed the appearance of a bright flash of light over the Kyiv skyline that has not been linked to Russian air attacks on the Ukrainian capital.

Footage widely shared on social media shows the moment when a residential area in Kyiv was briefly illuminated by an unknown object at around 10 p.m. Wednesday night. Another clip showed a flaming object crashing to the ground.

Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv's military administration said on Telegram that the incident sparked an air raid alert to ensure there were no casualties from "debris falling to the ground."

It spurred Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak to tweet a UFO emoji without any further context, sparking a light-hearted thread that includes memes and cartoons of aliens and UFOs.

Ukrainian internal affairs advisor Anton Gerashchenko gave a more prosaic explanation, tweeting that according to preliminary information, the flash of light was caused by a NASA satellite.

NASA said this week that the retired 660-pound RHESSI spacecraft, which was decommissioned in 2018, would re-enter the atmosphere. However, Rob Margetta from NASA's Office of Communications told the BBC that the satellite was still in orbit at the time the flash was observed.

Alpha Centauri, a Ukrainian non-profit educational project said in a Telegram post that it was important not to spread "lies" that it was a satellite, clarifying that it was a "bolide (meteor).

"Today, the NASA RHESSI satellite, which observed solar flares from 2002 to 2018, should indeed re-enter Earth's atmosphere," it said in the post, according to a translation, "but the trajectory of its fall is very far from Ukraine."

The post urged people to "spread the word" about the truth of the incident and shared a map of the route of the satellite which, as of Thursday morning, was over the African countries of Chad and Libya.

Newsweek has contacted NASA for further comment

This year has seen a number of mysterious objects in the sky, some of which have required military intervention. In February, the U.S. Air Force downed an unidentified flying object over Lake Huron in Michigan, near the Canadian border. Objects over Alaska and northern Canada were also downed.

The speculation about alien involvement in a dramatic incident in the Kyiv sky offered some light relief following months of aireal bombardments by Russia that have targeted civilian infrastructure.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces said that they had destroyed 10 out of 11 Iranian-made Shahed drones dispatched by Russia Wednesday, a day when Russian troops also launched guided aerial bombs at Ukrainian territory.