Weird Lights Seen In New Jersey Skies: ‘Elon Musk, Is This You?’

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — In Montclair, two people saw “a line of at least 20 individual lights flying across the sky at 8:36 p.m. – one behind the other – as they made their way through Brookdale Park. In Newark, musician Bebe Rexha reported that she spotted “weird lights in the sky” and shared a video of an eerie, glowing string of dots journeying across the night horizon. Nearby, someone saw a “string of lights” in the sky flying over the South Mountain Reservation – “almost like a comet but much lower.”

“Did anyone else see these lights in the sky tonight?” a Bloomfield resident asked in a local Facebook group on Saturday.

These sightings – and more like them – lit up social media across North Jersey last weekend, with the weird illumination puzzling many residents and inspiring conjectures about aliens and UFOs.

But other people had their own theory about what the lights actually were: Starlink satellites launched by Elon Musk’s Space X.

According to the Space X website, 22 of its Starlink satellites were launched into low-Earth orbit from its complex at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:38 p.m. on Friday. The satellites are designed to deliver high-speed, low-latency internet to users across the world.

Starlink satellites were reported to be in the area last weekend on findstarlink.com, a website that tracks the Space X devices.

“I don't know what we saw, but I know I've never seen anything like that in my life,” a Montclair resident wrote about the unusual sighting on Saturday.

He told Patch that he and his friend now believe what they saw were the Starlink satellites. But at the time – staring up at the weird phenomenon – it wasn’t hard to “entertain the idea that they could have been extraterrestrial in nature.

Essex County wasn’t the only place in New Jersey where sightings of the glowing lights were reported last weekend.

Jay Respler, a Monroe Township resident, told Patch that there is “no question” that the lights spotted last weekend are Starlink satellites.

Respler – who shared several computerized views of the sky taken at the time of the sightings – said he’s been an active satellite observer for years, and has tracked the Starlink satellites since they were first launched.

When an X user posted a video of “strange lights” in the sky, others commented that they saw the same thing in Piscataway and Bergen County. Another person said they saw them over Washington County in New York.

“Elon Musk, is this you?” another X user commented, sharing a photo taken in Lavallette.

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