© Marie Mela
An Austrian student's video of a UFO-like object captured while lighting New Year's fireworks has gone viral after it was posted online.
Marie Mela from Vienna was enjoying the New Year with friends in the Mostviertel region of Lower Austria, famous for the large number of pear orchards from where schnapps and cider are made.
But she insists that the video on her Facebook post is genuine, and has appealed in her message for anybody else who saw the phenomena to get in touch.
The video shows a group of young people outside with the clinking of champagne glasses, and the sound of the Danube waltz traditionally clearly heard playing as it is a New Year tradition in Austria as people wish each other all the best for 2016.
Alongside somebody lets off a firework, which heads into the sky and as it explodes, a silver white object can be seen framed by clouds and lightning forking in the area.
One girl is seen looking wide-eyed around her, while a man can be heard saying: "Did anybody see that?"
She wrote: "WTF, not sure if this is a UFO over Lower Austria or some bizarre weather phenomenon. Anyone any idea what it is? Did anybody else see this on the New Year?"
The video has been viewed thousands of times after she posted on Facebook with the hashtags #blitz #ufo #mostviertel #party.
Comment: Hmmm, lightning in Austria in the dead of winter? Not likely,
say local meteorologists:
However, weather experts have cast doubt on the video's authenticity, telling the Kurier newspaper that there was no lightning in the Mostviertel area on New Year's Eve. "We have also seen the video, and we checked the weather conditions at the time. There was no lightning in the area," Ubimet meteorologist Roland Reiter said.
We've seen lightning strikes light up and possibly even hit UFOs before, but this would be the first time we've seen lightning strike one of these spiraling comet-like UFOs, which have been sighted a number of times all over the world in recent years:
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Many of these cone-shaped 'UFOs', which usually begin as bright objects crossing the sky at apparently very high altitudes, and whose tails then fan out before the main object appears to 'separate' and create a spiral formation, behave so much like rockets launched into space that we've found it all but impossible to discern them from 'UFOS' (which, we suspect, are actually comet fragments entering, not leaving, the upper atmosphere).
The very high altitudes involved conflict with the scenario presented in the above video: lightning like this, at the level of clouds, should occur far lower than any comet-like tail.
For what it's worth, the original uploader, Marie Mela, insists the video is genuine, despite
frame-by-frame analysis appearing to reveal flaws in the footage.
I've seen this before.... Goblet of Fire when the Death Eaters conjured the 'Dark Mark'.