SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Bright, unusual lights overlooking the Bay Area were reported by several ABC7 viewers just after 6 a.m. on Friday.
"And we're like ok, uhh the apocalypse is happening," said San Bruno resident Ester Estrada.
Within minutes of the sighting, photos and videos came flooding into the ABC7 newsroom asking what this mysterious blob was.
"It was just nothing we had ever seen before for sure," said San Francisco resident Lindsay Hogan.
Hogan and her husband spotted it after just glancing out the window of their San Francisco home.
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"It was like this bright, luminescent blueish-white light that was coming. You could see something moving," she said.
Estrada and her son spotted it on their way to school in San Mateo over I-280.
"It was just completely bizarre because that stretch of 280 rarely has any light, so it was just complete darkness. And here's this beam of light, this blob of light, and it just looked like the skies, the heavens opened up and the light's shining down on us," Estrada said.
Turns out, it wasn't aliens. It was a scheduled SpaceX launch.
According to a post on X, Falcon 9 launched 23 Starlink satellites to orbit from the Vandenberg Space Force Base on Friday morning.
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"I actually, like, ran over and turned on the TV to see if the news was like aware of it yet and then right after I did that, I heard Drew Tuma say something like 'Oh, it's a SpaceX launch,' so it kind of calmed my nerves a little bit," Hogan said.
ABC7 News Meteorologist Drew Tuma included this update in his 6:30 a.m. forecast.
"Those clear skies allowed us to see the SpaceX rocket launch earlier this morning at 6:07," Tuma said. "It got launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barabra. You may have seen what you thought was a comet, kind of looked like an orb in the morning sky. That is the rocket that was launched."
It's something Estrada says she was already familiar with after seeing one other SpaceX launch in the past.
"We saw it coming in, and then you could see it flying apparently. Kind of like parallel to the horizon this morning, so we could see the whole trajectory of it, which was just cool," Estrada said.