Simon Church, a retired football player, has ignited a UFO hunting craze after posting a bizarre video of a glowing white orb flying in the sky.
“Just seen the craziest thing whilst having a look at Venus tonight,” he tweeted, saying the object was hovering too high to be a drone.
The camera zoom turns the orb into a blurry blob with a visible round outline within it; the object disappears from sight toward the end of the video.
Just seen the craziest thing whilst having a look at Venus tonight. It was way to high to be a drone and then just disappeared 🤯 #ufo #ufosighting #crazy #whatdoyouthink pic.twitter.com/dRpj74DhVO
— Simon Church (@churchy18) March 24, 2020
Church, a former Wales international who had played for Reading and Charlton, suggested that the orb was the International Space Station passing overhead. “Gutted it’s not Mars Attacks,” he wrote.
Several commenters from England and Ireland said they had witnessed a similar sighting around the same time.
The ISS typically travels in a straight line, but the object’s movement is not clear from the video; it appears impossible to confirm its authenticity either.
One user backed the ISS theory, saying the moment in the clip when the object disappears is when the ISS goes into the Earth’s shadow and its solar panels stop reflecting the sunlight.
The inhabited space outpost is currently orbiting the planet at a speed of roughly 7.66 km per second. The UK was on the space station’s trajectory this week, although some commenters said the object had too strange of a flight pattern.
“Too big for drone, no noise at all from it so not a police helicopter,” said a resident of Peterborough, England. “Don't think it is the ISS as [I have] seen that before and [it] looked nothing like this.”
Another user joked: “First wave of extraterrestrial from Proxima Centauri checking if we are down yet.”
