Qatar: Strange Lights Over Doha

Monday, January 28th, 2008 @ 20:01 UTC
by Amira Al Hussaini

Qatar's bloggers are looking at the night's skies trying to understand what the strange bouncing lights a blogger captured with her camera phone are all about. Is it a UFO, an aircraft, a meteor or Spiderman?

Qatar's bloggers are having a ball discussing what these strange lights over Doha's skies were all about.

Writing in Qatar Living, LifeIsBeautiful opens Pandora's Box:

I hope I'm not the only one who has witnessed the two strange lights over Doha yesterday. It was around 9.30 pm when I was standing in front of my house at Matar Kadeem (Old Airport). I looked up randomly and saw a bright flame in the sky.It was appearing to be the size of a tennis ball with very bright flames like light flickering almost about 2 mile high.It was moving at a very slow pace and had it not been for the hight at which it was,I would have ignored it as a balloon.

All of us were amazed and were joined by a lot of other onlookers.All of us were guessing as to what it could be. The light kept moving from South to North for about 10 mins. It was moving in a straight line and then started wobbling at it place.After about 3-4 more mins, it vanished in to the clouds. This was not it. After about another 5 mins a similar light appeared in the South horizon and followed a similar pattern. Did anyone on QL notice it? What could it be?

Readers were quick to respond, with reactions ranging from the cynical aircraft lights to the imaginative UFO sightings. Here's a sample of some of the responses:

Mariam-mar explains:

It might be a kind of meteor, that's one looks like, though i haven't seen a real one in my eyes at my age.

Femme adds:

Must be aircraft's navigation lights. That time of the night that portion of airspace is opened (for a limited time) to air traffic coming from the west. Or it could be one of the aircraft from al udeid, they have all types of aircraft over there.

Absolutejaguar is not happy with these explanations and ventures further:

It is interesting how everyone assumes Aircraft lights, whilst it is true that the simplest explanation is often the right one, does nobody entertain the idea of extraterrestrial life. I'm not talking little green men, but we live in a huge galaxy in a huge universe. It would be very arrogant to assume we are the only life in existence.

Eby1975 chimes in, giving a first-witness account:

Even I saw it while driving down to the Airport road. Intially it looked like a large balloon to me and I said to myself thats strange ..moon cant be that big and as I drove closer to the airport to have a better look, it was diminishing and thought to myself ..must be the cloud that could be over shadowing it.. UFO sounds bit scare .. not that I havent seen strange ppls around !!!!!

Dweller brings us back to reality and says it was Spiderman, while Dreamz believes it was a firecracker.

Meanwhile, the discussion continues at QatarLiving.