Late Thursday evening, the Israeli police received several hundred reports of a strange luminous object with a plume of smoke flying high in the sky and turning into a luminous spiral.
UFOs were seen by residents of all parts of the country - from Galilee to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea coast, the media published a video of the mysterious phenomenon.
Especially many reports about the object came from residents of the north of the country. The police in the northern district told the callers that they had contacted the IDF and were trying to find out the nature of the unknown phenomenon, but the military could not immediately explain what it was, Haaretz reports.
We saw a luminous celestial body with a plume of smoke in Lebanon, as reported by the website of the local newspaper "Al-Nahar". Similar reports were received from the Syrian-Turkish border. Lebanese newspapers suggested that a particularly large meteor flew in the sky, but Israeli expert Yigal Pat-El, chairman of the Astronomers' Association, rejected this theory.
Ynet offers another explanation: most likely, the Israelis and Lebanese saw the Russian Topol intercontinental missile, the successful test of which was announced at that time by the Russian Defense Ministry. RIA Novosti reported that the Topol rocket was launched at 21:39 Moscow time from the Kapustin Yar test site in the Astrakhan region, and the missile hit the target.
Russian media are citing the words of Vadim Koval, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense for the Strategic Missile Forces, that “the training warhead of the missile hit a conventional target at the Kazakhstani Sary-Shagan training ground with a given accuracy. The Israeli newspaper reminds that in 2009 thousands of Norwegians saw a similar luminous spiral, and a day later the Russian Ministry of Defense admitted that an unsuccessful launch of the Bulava rocket was made.