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Seth Jarvis has seen stranger things.
As the director of Clark Planetarium and a fan of astronomical phenomena, Jarvis knows when something in the sky is odd: And the spinning lights that attendees of a Red Butte Garden concert reported seeing Tuesday night were nothing out of the ordinary.
"Weird lights in the sky," he said, "are nothing new."
The lights, described as about 20 to 30 orbs stretched out in the dark sky, hung over the foothills of eastern Salt Lake City about 8:30 p.m. Several people attending the Tears for Fears concert stopped to take pictures, but the lights didn't show up, one attendee said. Some feared it might be alien activity or space junk burning in the atmosphere, while others thought it could be birds flying overhead with the concert lights reflecting off their wings. But Jarvis said it's likely something much more benign: floating lanterns with candles or helium balloons with glow sticks.
"The description seems more terrestrial than extraterrestrial," Jarvis said.
The planetarium was not notified by the local meteorological society of a "significant" astronomical phenomenon, Jarvis said. The dimness and pattern of movement, he added, also point to something man-made and locally launched — space matter burning in the atmosphere likely would show up brighter in pictures.
There's a family on the east bench, Jarvis said, that periodically launches small hot-air lanterns; those craft float in groups and could appear to spin. Jarvis guessed that those created the lights, or that it was "somebody [else] just having fun with a light source."
In the fall, there's also a star, named Canopus, that appears brighter and twinkles because of atmospheric turbulence caused by the shift between warm days and cool nights. The light from that star can "look like an aircraft-landing light," though Jarvis suspects that that's not what the concertgoers saw Tuesday — they reported seeing multiple orbs.
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