Berlin - Many residents in Germany were left breathless when they looked up at the evening sky on Monday. The reason was a huge, luminous spiral swirling across the firmament. What was going on?

Photographer Thomas Peise immediately took a camera when he spotted the glowing blue apparition in the sky over Berlin at around 9.20 pm.

Several posts also quickly gathered on the X platform, also reporting the curious sighting.

One user reported that the apparition could also be seen over Düsseldorf Airport at around 10 pm. "It was in one spot for a whole 10 minutes, moved slowly south and then was gone." He described the sighting as "inexplicable" and "fascinating". Another saw the spectacle over Hamburg.

Eyewitnesses in other countries were also almost left speechless when they looked up at the sky on Monday evening. One X user from the Netherlands wrote: "Here at nine o'clock it was clearly and brightly visible over my village Bergharen near Nijmegen." Further reports were received from Italy, France and Croatia, for example.

But what was it all about?

While some eyewitnesses immediately sensed an extraterrestrial origin and spoke of an imminent "space attack", the French medium "XploraSpace" provided a logical-sounding explanation on X.

The blue spiral is said to be connected to the flight of a SpaceX rocket. A Falcon 9 rocket owned by billionaire Elon Musk (53) actually took off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1.48 pm (local time) on Monday on a secret mission into space . According to German time, the celestial spiral appeared on the airwaves around three hours after the rocket lifted off.

Incidentally, this phenomenon is not the first of its kind. In 2023, a spiral of this kind appeared over Alaska . At that time, the supposed "portal" was quickly explained: according to Welt, a SpaceX launch vehicle was also the cause of the celestial phenomenon in this incident.

After orbiting our planet, the "Falcon 9" dropped fuel during the landing maneuver.

The water contained in the emitted gas then freezes at altitude to form tiny crystals that reflect the sunlight. From the ground, this looks like a large cloud, which then becomes a vortex due to the rocket's tumbling motion.

It is therefore fairly certain that aliens were not involved in the impressive phenomenon yesterday evening, but rather a rather rich entrepreneur who wants to conquer space.