Location of Sighting: Richland, Washington
Date of Sighting: March 25, 2021
Time of Sighting: 9 PM PDT
Description (Narration of Video): What is that? It looks like a bunch of fireballs, something in orbit. I wonder if that is a comet. It looks like embers strung through sky.They just died out. That is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen.
Note: It is difficult to say what these objects are. They could be star-link satellites. However, one light appears to blink and they are probably too bright to be star-link satellites. They could also be space debris entering the atmosphere.
Update – Mar 27, 2021: An article in the Seattle Times Newspaper confirmed that the string of “embers” was a Space X rocket crashing back to Earth. See details of article from the Seattle Times (https://www.seattletimes.com) below:
Genevieve Reaume was outside her Portland home walking her six-month-old puppy Thursday evening when she saw in the sky a fast-moving shower of glowing points of fire.
“It was right over our heads and it was just these streaks of light,” said Reaume, a TV reporter at KATU in Portland. “We’re standing in the middle of the street, watching this crazy light show above our heads, wondering: What in the world are we witnessing?”
From the big windows in her home between south Seattle and Renton, Michelle Zimmerman, principal and teacher at Renton Prep Christian School, has a view of the planes coming and going at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Hearing what she thought could be explosions, she looked out and also saw the extraordinary sight: “a bunch of cool, glowing lights moving quickly and horizontally in our window view from right to left.”
“It did look really beautiful because it had kind of like a sparkly look, metallic brush strokes painted in the sky,” she said.
All over the Pacific Northwest, anyone lucky enough to be outside at 9 p.m. on Thursday witnessed something remarkable: For about 40 seconds, a cloud of fiery objects streaked across the heavens, trailing parallel tails of fire.
It was bits of a SpaceX rocket crashing back to Earth, but at the time it was a cosmic mystery.
“We were awe-struck,” said Reaume. “Completely swept up and overwhelmed with what we were seeing.”
“Of course being a news reporter, the first thing I do is grab my phone,” she said. Videos of the celestial apparition quickly went viral on social media.
In ancient times, such an event would surely have been interpreted as an augur of something very significant, the birth of a king, or a god roused to anger.
Even in modern minds, delusions of an apocalypse or an alien invasion surfaced Thursday on social media.
More sensible residents of this region grasped in the moment for other explanations.
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