Residents across San Diego, California, saw mysterious lights in the night sky hovering over the Pacific Ocean on Monday.
Twitter users stormed the platform with eyewitness videos, wondering who was responsible for the multiple unidentified lights.
“There are some wild lights floating over downtown San Diego,” one Twitter user wrote. “Does anyone know if it’s 4th or July related, or the Navy, or do I get to believe it’s finally aliens visiting us?”
Another Twitter account tweeted a video, saying the unmoving and bright orange and “reddish” lights went on for about an hour in patterns of two, three, four, five, and six. The user later tweeted an update with a flight radar screenshot showing military flights in the area two hours later.
“Lights seem to have stopped with its return. Coincidence or cause???” the user tweeted.
ABC7 reported that “there weren’t any commercial or military aircraft on the radar in the area” during the phenomenon, while Zerohedge showed a Google Trends graphic displaying “UFO” spiked across the region.
Reddit users, however, took to the platform to share theories that the fireballs were flares burning from military planes flying around the area.
“Here is your answer to all those lights in the sky,” said one Redditor, showing a picture from flight-tracking website Flightradar24 in which at least two military airplanes were shown flying in circles off the San Diego coast — one of which was a Lockheed Martin KC-130.
Simultaneously, documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell recently told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview that dozens of sailors confirmed U.S. warships were swarmed by at least 100 unidentified flying objects in 2019.
“The incident went on for hours, and then happened again and again throughout the month, with craft hovering and zipping around near the fleet with flashing multicolored lights,” the Daily Mail reported.
U.S. officials denied the incident, however, with Deputy Director for Naval Intelligence Scott Bray saying he was “reasonably confident” the UFOs were drones.
Last month, Congress held its first UFO hearing in half a century in which Pentagon officials testified under oath about military reports of unexplained phenomena showing an object speeding past a military fighter jet.
It’s not the first time the United States, or even San Diego, has seen strange lights appear in the night sky. In 2018, CBS8 reported similar lights. But the military later confirmed the flares were from a Squadron VMGR-325, “The Raiders,” training mission 30 miles off the coast.