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Blue UFO soars over Hawaii before crashing into the sea
The FAA reported no unusual aircraft incidents.
In what might be the last UFO sighting of 2020, a glowing blue blob streaked across the night sky and crashed into the waters by Oahu, Hawaii, on Dec. 29, according to news reports.
Multiple people on the ground saw the blue flying object, with some recording it; those reports and calls to 911 led the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to investigate the sighting.
However, FAA officials weren't able to shed much light on the mystery, saying there weren't any aircraft incidents or accidents reported in that area when the UFO sped by at about 8:30 p.m. local time, according to Hawaii News Now.
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Shaky, blurry footage of the blue light was posted to YouTube on Monday (Jan. 4).
The strange incident has led to speculations about aliens and crashed aircraft, as well as more benign explanations; one person on Twitter wondered whether it was an LED kite, New Delhi Television reported.
A 38-year-old woman who goes by Moriah saw the bright blue object, which she said was as long as a telephone pole, whizzing over Princess Kahanu Estates on the western coast of Oahu. "I look up and then I was like oh s***!" she told Hawaii News Now.
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Moriah said she began filming and jumped into the car with her family, following the bright light for 3 miles (5 kilometers) before watching it silently plummet into the ocean.
Shortly after they called 911, an officer arrived. That's when Moriah and her husband spotted another light. "My husband went 'Look up,'" she told Hawaii News Now. "The white one was smaller — was coming in the same direction as the blue one." But they weren't able to track that light after it disappeared over a nearby mountain.
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Local police said they didn't have any additional information about the event, Hawaii News Now reported. While it's unknown what caused these mysterious lights, it's not uncommon for people to mistake human-made or natural objects — including lightning, missile tests, balloons and even Venus — for UFOs, Live Science previously reported.
And though this might be the last UFO sighting of 2020, we can't wait to see what 2021 brings.
Originally published on Live Science.
Laura is the managing editor at Live Science. She also runs the archaeology section and the Life's Little Mysteries series. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.