In Sacramento, Elijah Prychodzko, using his telescope and iPhone, recorded a strange explosion in space on Dec. 20th around 5pm and shared it with CBS 13. “I saw something that I’d never seen before. I saw another object orbiting this — whatever it was up there, and I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Prychodzko.
He thought it was a little strange so he put his phone down, called his nephew, and then returned to shoot a second video clip.
“Oh my God, it just blew up. Something blew up,” he’s heard saying on the video.
“As soon as I put the camera to the telescope it just blew up and I didn’t know what to say,” he told CBS13.
Good Day Sacramento’s Cody Stark contacted Dr. Stephen P Maran, who wrote the book Astronomy for Dummies, and said that he didn’t recognize the “explosion” as a known astronomical phenomenon. CBS contacted a Vatican expert who said it could be some sort of light refraction.
Here is the video of the strange explosion in the sky.
Could this have been the Air Force's mysterious robotic space plane, the X-37B. OTV 3 had just launched on Dec. 11th by the United Launch Alliance for its top secret mission.
America’s first reusable unmanned spaceplane, the X-37B, made its inaugural trip to orbit in April, completing more than a decade of work by NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. The X-37B looks and behaves like a shrunken space shuttle, right down to its method of reentry; once it completes its mission, it will glide back to Earth and land on a runway in California. What is the mission? Sorry, that’s classified. But we do know that this kind of unmanned mini shuttle is attractive for many reasons. Because it’s smaller and doesn’t carry humans, it’s cheaper and simpler to launch. It can be reused repeatedly to ferry satellites to orbit in its payload bay. Soon after launch, amateur astronomers spotted the plane in an orbit used by observation satellites.
Find out more in the Space War News