A bright flash and a trail of burning debris in the sky sparked an avalanche of reactions on social networks… On Wednesday April 19, a flash of unknown origin in the skies of Kiev triggered an anti-aircraft alert, the city being on edge after months of Russian missile attack. “It’s up to the experts to find out what exactly it was. The most important thing is the safety of Kiev and its inhabitants. It was not a missile attack and our anti-aircraft defense did not have a recourse to its weapons”, reassured Sergiy Popko, head of the military administration of the city.
The Ukrainian space agency for its part affirmed shortly after that the flash would be due to a meteorite. “We cannot identify the thing exactly. Our hypothesis is that it is a meteorite, but to establish its exact nature, we lack data,” the deputy chief told Agence France-Presse. from the control center of the space agency of Ukraine, Igor Kornienko.
Mountings of flying saucers
Initially, the hypothesis was that the fall of a NASA satellite, announced earlier in the week, was the source of the light signal. The latter, called Rhessi, had the mission since 2002 to observe solar flares. But in a statement to Agence France-Presse (AFP), NASA said Rhessi had not yet entered the atmosphere at the time of the light flash seen in the sky over Kiev. The Pentagon predicts Rhessi “will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at approximately 8:50 p.m. Wednesday (3:50 a.m. Thursday Kyiv time) with a window of plus or minus an hour,” NASA said Wednesday. “No other NASA satellite has re-entered the atmosphere earlier today. [mercredi]“, also said the agency.
The successive declarations of the authorities did not prevent the social networks from igniting, by broadcasting montages with flying saucers. They have also multiplied memes and humorous videos on the themes of the arrival of extraterrestrials and the war against Russia.
Sergiy Popko then called not to broadcast these images with the official Air Force logo. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak also joked that the flash was not a “UFO”, then later clarified that the Air Force would provide an update on the cause of the flash. mysterious light.