A photographer from Zurich, Switzerland, captured the sighting of a flying object on Monday (8/11) night. He shared this photo via Twitter account @Eavix1Eavix, calling it a donut-shaped UFO. Actually, what is that thing?
Consisting of several concentric rings of bright blue, the flying object does look like a donut-shaped spaceship. The photographer suspects he actually caught a glimpse of SpaceX's Endeavor capsule, which was scheduled to return to Earth that evening with four astronauts who had just completed a 200-day stay on the International Space Station (ISS).
British tabloid site The Daily Mail even included the photos taken in the collection of Endeavor sightings the following day. But the thing is, it looks like the guess was wrong. The reason is, the Endeavor capsule that slid to Earth that night landed in another hemisphere, namely the Gulf of Mexico. It is 8,000 kilometers from Zurich.
Meanwhile, residents in Louisiana, Alabama, and several other Gulf states saw a clear view of the capsule gliding across the sky. It is almost impossible for anyone in Switzerland to see the plane's re-entry to Earth.
"Any trajectory of (Endeavour) in Switzerland before landing that night will be completely in Earth's shadow, i.e. it will not be illuminated by the Sun and therefore invisible," said Marco Langbroek, an amateur satellite tracker and researcher at Leiden University, quoted from Space.com.
"The reentry itself passes through Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico, and will not be visible from Switzerland. The deorbit burn, before re-entry, is above the Indian Ocean, so it will not be visible from Switzerland either," he continued.
What's that thing?
If the donut-shaped UFO isn't a SpaceX spacecraft, then what is it? According to Langbroek, the unidentified flying object over Switzerland may not have flown at all. It could be an image of a distant star so that it looks less clear.
"I'm pretty sure that the 'donut UFO' in the image taken by the Swiss photographer is an out-of-focus image of a bright star," Langbroek said.
However, another image taken by the photographer that night appears to show a zigzag trail of light behind the object, indicating that the object is indeed moving.
According to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, it is possible that the donut UFO is the top of the rocket, the small, uppermost part of the rocket used to propel the plane into orbit. It re-enters the atmosphere and burns.
However, without a precise time frame for the photographs, it is difficult to attribute the mysterious light to objects known to exist in the night sky.
Is it a star, a rocket, or something else? For now, the donut UFO in the Swiss skies remains a secret and has so far been a completely unrecognizable flying object.
