Green skies in Turkey

The skies in Izmir - a metropolitan city in the western extremity of Anatolia - turned green recently, leaving people awestruck and in the wonder of the ‘celestial force’ sparking within/behind the clouds, causing the sky’s bog-standard appearance to change. Since this type of event is not something that people see every day, there were many pictures and videos uploaded of the phenomenon.

A Twitter user going by the name ‘— Halil İbrahim Çakan (@h_ibrahimcakan) July 31, 2021’ uploaded a video of this paranormal/transcendental view, and seconds later people started spouting multiple theories in the comments as to what this could be.

The video - and many others - clearly depict the ball of fire ‘nosediving’ from and into the sky. For a fleeting moment, it is concealed by the clouds, but then it bursts into a blinding light, turning the entire sky a bright green for a few seconds. The luminosity continued to increase, making everything vanish into white before the ball of fire collapses/disintegrates somewhere in the isolated lands with a resounding bang.

Many users have uploaded photos and videos on their social media platforms, all of which show the same spectacle from different angles.

The human mind is immediately aroused and begins thinking of surreal suppositions when something unnatural occurs, so, as expected, many different theories and comments have also been shared based on the nature of this object. These speculations ranged from; intergalactic junk and rocket debris to ‘alien tricks’. Many users were also certain that they had discerned a UFO (unidentified flying object) in the sky.

Dr Hasan Ali Dal, the associate director at Aegean University Observatory did all of us a huge favour by putting these absurd theories to rest and suggesting more practical ones. He stated that - according to LADBible - the ‘green fireball’ was actually a meteor, and that meteors usually light up and ‘ooze’ bright colours as they begin to burn while setting foot into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Believed to peak around August 11 - and was scheduled to start on July 26 - this meteor is a part of the Perseids Meteor Shower. This shower was first spotted by NASA. On/around August 11, almost 50 meters will be able to be spotted in one hour, making ‘Persieds’ one of the biggest meteor showers of the year. This meteor shower takes place every year between July and August. These many meteors shoot through the sky at over 1,00,000 mph. Most of the time, the remnants of these don't even reach earth.

A user going by the name Ehsan Elahi postulated, “A green #meteor was seen over #Izmir #Turkey. This is not a meteor, just a tiny/demo missile/bomb shot from a satellite. Notice the fire as the meteor enters the earth’s atmosphere.”

Another user by the name ‘gemmahowell8’ on Twitter shared a video with the caption “Izmir Turkey overnight people thought it was a meteor. Not only did this video stun the people of the region, but also the active social media users. This video - by ‘gemmahowell8’ - has accumulated 20K views - maybe more - and a sundry of reactions.

Netizens (social media users) who were thrown aback by the video took to the comments section to share their theories and views. One - or more - users commented, “looks like a meteor, what else can it be? A rocket? Where was the impact?”.

Another individual opined “ever notice how all "meteors" generally come from the same direction? up in the sky at an angle, always the same angle".

A few other people shared their opinions which were along the lines of, "Yeah there was a huge one in Russia several years back that behaved exactly as this did. a scary sight, regardless!".

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