Was it a rocket? A missile? A UFO?
Early risers who were out watching the New Year’s sunrise on the beach saw something.
“I knew what I was looking at was either a missile or a rocket,” says John Simard who was taking pictures of the sunrise in Fort Pierce.
“What I couldn’t understand was why was I seeing it in that area because there’s no launch pads out in the ocean.”
Several reported seeing the object with a fiery trail from Vero Beach to Jensen Beach in the moments before the sunrise.
“Looks like a rocket you know, could be aliens,” says Josh Plauche, who looked at the photos from Fort Pierce.
“It’s very easy to speculate people think they see something,” says Sanford Manley a former historian with the Strategic Air Command.
Manley says what people saw was actually the contrail of a plane being illuminated by the rising sun.
He says the phenomenon typically occurs more often with planes during sunsets than sunrises.