Mystery lights appear over Tokyo, sparks off fear and confusion among netizens

A strange ball of light appeared in the skies above Tokyo on Monday evening (July 10), sparking both excitement and concern among netizens within the area. The phenomenon reportedly occured at around 8pm at Kawagoe and Okegawa, Saitama Prefecture.

Upon spotting the "mysterious light", many Japanese locals recorded the event on their phones, uploading their own clips onto Twitter, along with their own reactions, sparking off discussion as to what the lights may be and where they might have come from.

[embed]https://twitter.com/MinachanW/status/884384450515054592[/embed]

The tweet here, roughly translated, goes like this:

"My friend and I saw two lights in the sky and we thought it was from a UFO.
Suddenly, something else appeared in between the two lights before dropping out of sight again.
The two lights stayed in place for awhile more before shaking and disappearing into the sky.
I was so afraid that I trembled. Is this a UFO?"

[embed]https://twitter.com/ryoto101024/status/884371761235546113[/embed]

Besides the usual suggestions that the lights belonged to a UFO, there was also speculation that the lights actually came from a falling meteorite.

However, that particular hypothesis was also quickly put down by President Tomio Itiga of the Japan Planetarium Council, who asserted that the movement of the lights made it very unlikely that they would belong to an ordinary meteorite.

Amid the speculation, there were also fears that there was a similarity to the light emissions produced during the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake in 1995. 

Earthquake lights have been recorded to occur before, during, and after earthquakes with high magnitude, and may take on many different types of shapes, forms, and colours.

In fact, an earthquake of 5.2-magnitude on the Richter scale hit the southern Japan island of Kyushu earlier today (July 11). Fortunately, there have been no immediate reports of any deaths or injuries. 

nicchew@sph.com.sg