When a mystery fireball-like material lit the Bangkok sky on Monday morning, commuters and social media enthusiasts were quick to post their thoughts on what was happening: Was it a meteor?, Was it a balloon catching a fire? Or was it just some space junk floating through the atmosphere?
“There is a high possibility that the object spotted this morning... on social media, is an object from outer space," Saran Poshyachinda, Deputy Director of National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, told CNN.
He added, "it was extraterrestrial, as a satellite would have been traveling on a west-east axis, whereas the object traveled in the opposite direction before bursting into flames."
"It looks like an asteroid traveling to Earth and grazing through the air and it turned into a fireball.”
The video and photos reveal that the object that appeared to be a fireball could have burned out at 62 miles above ground from Bangkok.
However, there was inadequate evidence to suggest what exactly the object is, noted Poshyachinda.
The mystery fireball, The Bangkok Post reported could have been a burning balloon, according to an official from the Bangkok Planetarium believed it could could have been a burning balloon.
The Satview website had said that an object such as space junk was supposed to burn through the atmosphere at approximately the same time as the fireball seen in the Bangkok sky.
The Deputy Governor of the province told reporters that there is little chance that the light was an aircraft going down. The last Asian airplane crash was the Air-Asia flight going from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore. All passengers and crew were killed when the plane nose-dived into the Java Sea, presumably due to bad weather.
However, there were no reports of aircraft or chopper crashes in the province.
The Twitterratti soon came up with its own explanations for the fireball mystery for the fireball in Bangkok:
Unconfirmed photo of the meteorite that hit #Thailand this morning tweeted by @tri26: pic.twitter.com/OAPITDt3gS
— Richard Barrow (@RichardBarrow) September 7, 2015
We've got a bigger problem now... pic.twitter.com/KQOpCOLYkM
— c3opo (@c3opo) September 7, 2015.
BBC News has posted a video of the big swirl of light coming down on Bangkok, here.
