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No invaders from Alpha Centauri. Not even an alien abduction. That light show over northern Utah Wednesday night that generated a flood of 911 calls? Just space junk.

Specifically, the streaking, glowing pyrotechnics that lit up the clear, starry skies over the Wasatch Front for about 15-20 seconds beginning at 10:36 p.m. Wednesday was identified as a Chinese rocket booster body burning up in the atmosphere.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, identified the debris as being part of the second stage from the first Chang Zheng 7 (a.k.a. "Long March") rocket, which was launched a month ago.

Clark Planetarium Director Seth Jarvis said that while the debris may have appeared closer to the Earth when spotted late Wednesday night over Utah and Nevada, it actually was roughly 50 miles up when it began to burn up.

There were no reports of any of the debris landing in Utah, or anywhere else in the country for that matter. The breakup of the booster was witnessed throughout the western United States.

"This thing basically was a big, empty aluminum can, about the size of a school bus," Jarvis said Thursday. "But it would be really unusual for anything to survive [re-entry]."

According to NASA, the rocket was launched on its maiden flight June 25 from China's new Wenchang Space Launch Center on Hainan Island. The main payload aboard the rocket was a "scaled-down version of a next generation crew vehicle that was successfully recovered in Inner Mongolia after a short orbital flight," NASA stated.

Public safety dispatchers reportedly fielded numerous calls from the curious throughout northern Utah, and even from some observers in Carbon and Washington counties, in central and southern Utah, respectively.

Jarvis said incidents of space junk re-entering, and burning up in the atmosphere are rather commonplace, though usually few people actually witness such events due to the times they occur or the remote, unpopulated regions where they might be visible.

"This is a fairly regular occurrence. There are thousands of these objects up there," Jarvis said. "Last night, it happened to de-orbit over a populated place where people could see it."

Twitter: @remims