If you went stargazing in Texas over the weekend, you might’ve seen something that looked less like a constellation and more like something out of The X-Files.

Several viral videos across social media show an odd sighting in the Sunday, January 18, night sky. In one video, a small, bright light is surrounded by what looks like a ring of other lights trailing behind. Social media users from across Texas – San Angelo, Copperas Cove, Hondo, Waco and the Dallas area alike – said they spotted the blur of light. According to some commenters, it was even visible from as far away as New Mexico and Oklahoma.

That broad footprint and its odd looks had people speculating – some suggesting it was a UFO and others claiming it was some divine act or the U.S.S. Enterprise. A majority of commenters, however, guessed it probably wasn’t a UFO but a SpaceX launch.

“Sometimes it looks like this with a halo of light other times it can look like a trail of lights linked across the sky. Eerie but still very cool to witness,” one commenter wrote under a TikTok posted by @rakd0se.

While some rockets do launch from Starbase, Texas, there haven’t been any since October 2025, according to the SpaceX website, and there don’t seem to be any upcoming on the schedule. Instead, the January 18 Falcon 9 Starlink mission – which many commenters claimed was responsible for the sky oddity – was actually launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, towards a landing pad in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission saw 29 Starlink satellites launched into low-Earth orbit around 5:30 p.m. CT, though quite a few social media users were skeptical that a Florida launch headed east would be visible from as far west as the Lone Star State and beyond.

Temple, Texas, TV station KCEN reported that the light show in the sky – visible nationwide, though more than 1,000 miles from San Antonio – most likely was the result of the Falcon 9 SpaceX launch, as the satellites can deploy into a ring shape while in transit. MySA reached out to SpaceX for comment, but did not hear back at the time of publication. We will update this story if and when we receive a response.

This article originally published at ‘Eerie’: Orb-like light in Texas sky sparks speculation as theories run wild.