Reports of a large, round, orange light near Scarborough first started coming in on Twitter around 11 p.m.

“Hovering in the same spot for half an hour now,” wrote one observer around 11:30 p.m. “Went out for about 10 seconds then came back. Note the hanging smoke around it.”

The light was atypically bright, illuminating the clouds around it for an estimated two hours before finally disappearing.

“It looked like a meteor, but the weird thing was it just hovered instead of moving or dissipating,” wrote someone on a UFO Hunters reporting website.

“I continued to check the object to the west of me as I proceeded north on the highway, and it remained in the same spot, glowing and hovering,” continued the anonymous spotter. “I thought this was a very odd object – it was not like a normal meteor sighting.”

“It looked like the sun was glowing bright but also saw smoke,” noted someone else in a Reddit thread about the light. “It almost looked like there was a huge explosion on the U.S. side as I’m right across the lake in West Rouge.”

So… what was it?

Most people (who don’t believe that aliens have found us just yet) suspect the light was caused by flares from a search and rescue mission.

Durham Police had indeed been searching for a missing boater off the coast of Ajax, Ontario earlier in the day. The 32-year-old man’s fishing boat was found unattended just before 3 p.m. on Thursday afternoon and he has yet to be located.

CBC News reports that a Royal Canadian Air Force Hercules plane was called in to assist the search on Thursday evening, which would explain the bright lights.

Sorry, extraterrestrial contact hopefuls. If they’re already found us, they’re not letting on… yet.

Source: blogTO