My phone lit up the other morning with a familiar kind of chaos. It was like a frantic, neighborly gossip chain, but instead of complaining about midnight fireworks or thoughtlessly abandoned dog poop or sketchy-looking cars driving too slowly, the subject was much bigger.

It was, quite literally, out of this world.

I didn't see the strange lights myself. My head was probably buried in my pillow at the time, dreaming of chocolate peanut butter cup-based furniture and eating my couch. But when I woke up, I saw a Facebook post from a group in my mom's neck of the woods, a good hundred miles or so north of Eau Claire. Someone had posted a blurry photo of a swirling, glowing orb in the night sky. The comments were a beautiful mess of confusion and concern: "What was that??" and "Did anyone else see it??" and “Should we be worried?”

"Well, that's odd," I thought. Then, a minute later, I saw another post. This time, it was from an Eau Claire Facebook community. Same strange light, different photos, same bewildered questions. Some said it looked like a glowing bowtie. Others said it looked like the Wu-Tang Clan logo. Others said it looked like a cloud of sentient robotic spores sent by the Lizard People.

They were all right. The universe, it seemed, was trying to get a message to me. Via Facebook.

My mind immediately went to a dark and spooky place. The kind of place you go to when you’re old enough to have spent years watching three back-to-back episodes of The X-Files on late night network television. It felt like an opening scene where everyone sees the same mysterious light and Mulder is the only one who believes it's more than a gas leak. Or maybe it was like the movie Signs, where a cosmic event is slowly, eerily revealed to have a global reach. The synchronicity of it, a hundred miles apart in my own little world, was enough to send a shiver down my spine. The vast, empty spaces between us in the Midwest suddenly felt much, much smaller.

”

I'M GLAD WE STILL HAVE PEOPLE WHO LOOK AT THE SKY AND SEE AN AWE-INSPIRING UKNOWN, EVEN IF IT'S JUST A ROCKET DUMPING ITS LEFTOVERS.

It means we haven't lost our sense of wonder, even when actual answers are readily available right in our pockets.

MIKE PAULUS

WRITER & WONDERER

Then, just as I was ready to start drawing crop circles in my un-mowed backyard, I saw a comment from someone in Missouri. Missouri! Suddenly, this wasn't just a regional anomaly – it was a nationwide event. The lights were seen across a huge swath of the country, from my mom's humble hometown to the Ozarks. It was exactly like a sci-fi novel, where the mysterious signs start small and then you realize the scale of it all, and you’re filled with a delicious, eerie sense of dread. The feeling was a mix of awe and genuine concern that we were all about to be … probed?

Of course, my delicious dread was quickly replaced by a much less cinematic, yet equally fascinating, truth. The strange lights weren’t aliens, not a top-secret government project, and not the onset of a new, global plague.

‘Twas a rocket.

A European Ariane 6 rocket, to be specific. It had launched from French Guiana, putting a weather satellite into a polar orbit. What everyone saw was the rocket’s second stage, high in the atmosphere, venting its leftover fuel. The rocket was spinning as it did this, and sunlight caught the frozen plume of exhaust just right, creating that mesmerizing, otherworldly spiral/Wu-Tang Clan logo.

Honestly, I find the real explanation just as cool as the alien invasion theory. It’s a testament to the incredible stuff humanity is doing, even when we don’t pay attention. It’s a reminder that mysteries exist, but they're often born from a beautiful confluence of science and happenstance.

But because the internet is the internet, and humans are rarely perfectly rational beings, the comments section inevitably devolved. I saw people who didn’t buy it. They saw a spiral and a plume and they saw alien shenanigans, and no amount of astronomical explanation could convince them otherwise.

And in a way, that's just as good. Because I'm glad we still have people who look at the sky and see an awe-inspiring unknown, even if it's just a rocket dumping its leftovers. It means we haven’t lost our sense of wonder, even when actual answers are readily available right in our pockets.

All manner of wonder abounds. And that, in itself, is a beautiful thing.