Livermore man recalls seeing mysterious bright streak across sky

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Bright lights in the big sky were all the buzz in the Bay Area Wednesday night. People in four states including California lit up social media with pictures and video. The lights turned out to be space junk.

Livermore resident Bryan Fagundes was outside enjoying a beautiful summer night, excited to try out his new cornhole board, when something unusual and spectacular caught his eye.

"You kind of just see it out of the corner of your eye, like, 'Oh look at that,' and then like, 'Whoa! It's going really slow, let me grab my camera.' So I just jetted and started following it down that way," he recalled.

People in California, Nevada, Utah, and Idaho shared their videos online, many not sure what they were seeing.

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"At first thought I thought okay maybe this is a meteor," he said. "But meteors usually break up like that."

Paul Doherty told ABC7 News, "A bright glowing object moving across the sky when all the stars are stationary and nothing changes in the sky. That's exciting no matter what it is."

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Doherty is a scientist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He says what Fagundes and others saw was space junk.

"We launch spacecraft into space, orbiting satellites, and rocket boosters, to get them up there," he explained. "And sometimes they come down and when they come down, they glow incandescently hot and make a streak in the sky."

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Doherty went on to say, "We now know this was the second stage of the Chinese rocket #7 that was launched June 25 and it finally decayed in its orbit and came back to Earth."

It made for a memorable instance of a classic game

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