What was that? The blue spiral in the sky – Norway 2009, Australia 2010, Hungary 2025

11 min read

A bluish-white spiral slowly unwinding from a bright point, eventually with a black “hole” in its center. In 2009, people in northern Norway watched it in astonishment; in March 2025, so did people across half of Europe, Hungary among them. The images have been circulating ever since, labeled “wormhole,” “portal” or “UFO.” We looked into it: both cases were caused by a rocket, and the phenomenon now returns almost like clockwork. Our verdict: identified.

The image that stopped everyone in their tracks

Anyone who saw it will not easily forget it. A bright point appears in the dark sky, and around it a faint, bluish-white spiral begins to unwind, growing and turning for minutes like a galaxy. Then a black spot appears in its center, the spiral spreads out, and it disappears.

Images and videos of the phenomenon spread in two big waves: from Norway in December 2009, and from almost all of Europe in March 2025. Both times the same questions came up: Had a wormhole opened in the sky? Extraterrestrials? A secret weapons test? In both cases the answer is the same, and much more down to earth.

1. Norway, December 9, 2009

On Wednesday morning, between roughly 7:45 and 8:00 a.m. local time, people in northern Norway saw a huge spiral in the eastern sky. The phenomenon was clearly visible from around Tromsø, Harstad, Skjervøy, Alta and Sortland, and it was even photographed from northern Sweden. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with several hundred phone calls.

According to the accounts, a blue beam of light appeared from behind a mountain, stopped in the air, and then an outward-unwinding, grayish-white spiral appeared at its end. The most famous photo was taken by Jan Petter Jørgensen, and this was the image that went around the world's press.

The speculation began immediately. Suggestions included a rare aurora, a wormhole, and even that experiments at the Swiss particle accelerator (LHC) had opened a “gate.” Because the phenomenon was visible above Tromsø, many suspected the EISCAT ionospheric research radar operating in the city. Antti Kero, a Finnish researcher who was in the EISCAT control room that morning preparing for a measurement, later wrote that he received a huge number of calls and emails asking how they had “done it.” A Russian TV channel joked that the Norwegians were welcoming Barack Obama, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo the next day, with a UFO show.

What the Russians announced

The next day, December 10, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that a test of a submarine-launched Bulava ballistic missile in the White Sea had failed. According to the ministry, the first two stages worked properly, and the fault occurred in the third phase of the trajectory. At the time, the Bulava was one of the military's most troubled programs: at least six of the previous 13 tests had failed.

What's more, the test was known about in advance. The Russian press had already reported in November that another Bulava launch would take place in December, and a navigation ban was issued for the affected area of the White Sea because of a missile launch. Such warnings are public; the press just rarely pays attention to them.

The question may arise: if the missile was over Russian territory, why didn't the Russians see it? According to the explanation of American space expert James Oberg, farther east, over Russia, the sky was already getting light, and the dawn glow drowned out the faint cloud, while over northern Norway it was still dark.

It wasn't over Norway

Although the world's press called it the “Norwegian spiral,” the phenomenon did not actually take place over Norway. According to triangulation of photos taken at different locations, the spiral appeared over Russia's Kola Peninsula and drifted northeast, toward the Barents Sea. According to an estimate by American engineer Tony Spell, the center of the spiral was at an altitude of 170–270 kilometers, that is, already in space, and the observers were more than 800 kilometers away from it. That's why it seemed slow and motionless: in reality, it was traveling at several thousand kilometers per hour.

A Finnish researcher, Alexander Kozlovsky, and his colleagues later also showed that instruments at the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (an ionosonde and a meteor radar) detected traces of the missile's breakup in the upper atmosphere. According to their description, the missile was destroyed at an altitude of about 200 kilometers over the Kola Peninsula. (Sources differ on exactly which stage failed: the ministry spoke of the third phase, Kozlovsky and colleagues of the second stage.)

It wasn't the first

A month earlier, on November 1, 2009, a smaller, similar light phenomenon had already been seen around Hammerfest. That time, too, it turned out to have been caused by a missile launched from a Russian submarine. So the Norwegian spiral was not without precedent: such “sky ghosts” have long been known wherever rockets are launched at twilight; it's just that by 2009 everyone had a camera.

2. Australia, June 5, 2010

Half a year later, people in eastern Australia saw a similar, yellowish-green, “lollipop-like” spiral at dawn over New South Wales, Queensland and Canberra. Local UFO researchers spoke of it as a sky phenomenon, but astronomers quickly found the explanation: barely an hour earlier, the very first flight of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket had launched from Florida, and its trajectory led right over Australia. The rocket's second stage was spinning more than expected, and it probably released its remaining propellant at that point.

Elon Musk told Space.com by email at the time only that he had heard Australians thought UFOs had been around.

3. Hawaii, New Zealand and the others

The Falcon 9 has since become the world's most-flown rocket, and the spirals are becoming more and more frequent:

In June 2022, a spiral was seen over Queenstown, New Zealand, after a Falcon 9 launch from Florida.
On January 18, 2023, the sky camera of the Japanese Subaru Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii recorded a “flying spiral.” The telescope's team itself pointed out that the phenomenon was linked to SpaceX's launch that day of a GPS satellite.
Reports of similar spirals also came in during 2024.

4. Hungary and Europe, March 24, 2025

On Monday evening, between about 9:00 and 9:10 p.m., a great many people all over Hungary saw a slowly rotating, ever-expanding blue spiral with a bright center. Reports came in from Budapest, Esztergom, Biatorbágy, Mosonmagyaróvár and many other places in the country. According to the witnesses, the bright center moved slowly south, and the spiral was visible to the naked eye for 4–5 minutes. Within minutes, social media was flooded with photos and videos.

The same thing was seen in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Sweden and Croatia. The British weather service (Met Office) said that same evening that it had received a large number of reports and that the phenomenon was probably caused by a Falcon 9 launch that day. The local service of the French Météo France simply wrote that it was not a UFO but a gas release from a Falcon 9.

What we know

That day at 6:48 p.m. Hungarian time, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, under the designation NROL-69. This was a classified mission for the agency that operates U.S. military reconnaissance satellites (NRO).
The rocket's first stage returned and landed in Florida a few minutes after launch.
After placing the satellite in orbit, and before its own return, the second stage released its remaining propellant.
The stage was spinning at the time, so the escaping propellant, which froze instantly, spread out in a spiral shape and was lit up by the Sun, which was still shining at that altitude.

The phenomenon was recorded by cameras at several observatories, including the University of Hertfordshire's Bayfordbury Observatory in England and a sky camera in Croatia (Plaški).

An interesting side note: even the explanation got muddled

Part of the Hungarian and international press quickly pinned it on SpaceX, but the details got mixed up. Some articles wrote about a Starlink launch and the return of the first stage. In reality, it was not a Starlink mission, and the spiral was not caused by the first stage (which had long since landed in Florida by then), but by the second stage. This shows well that even a correct explanation can become distorted as it spreads.

The most common objections

“A rocket can't draw such a perfect spiral.” Yes, it can: steady rotation and uniform outflow produce a perfectly regular spiral. Doug Ellison's computer simulation showed how back in 2009.
“If it was a rocket, why didn't it explode in flames?” In space there is no oxygen, no fireball and no sound. The propellant simply flows out and freezes.
“The same spiral was seen in Australia, China and elsewhere.” Yes, because the phenomenon is not unique: it can be seen anywhere a rocket's trajectory passes over observers at twilight. The Australian spiral was the very first flight of the Falcon 9.
“The EISCAT radar in Tromsø or HAARP did it.” These ionosphere research facilities cannot create a visible, spiral-shaped cloud, and besides, the phenomenon was not over Norway but over Russia.

Our verdict: identified. The 2009 Norwegian spiral was caused by a failed Russian Bulava missile test, for which an advance navigation warning had been issued and which Moscow acknowledged the next day. The 2025 European spiral was a propellant release by a Falcon 9 second stage after the NROL-69 mission. The phenomenon is real and spectacular, but it is not a mystery.

Will it happen again?

Almost certainly. In 2024 there was a record 261 orbital rocket launches worldwide, a large share of them Falcon 9s. A spiral requires a lucky coincidence: twilight, clear skies, and a rocket stage releasing its propellant in just the right place. From Hungary this is rare, but as March 2025 showed, it's not impossible.

Images and videos

Norway, 2009

Jan Petter Jørgensen's famous photo in Antti Kero's post on the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory blog: https://blog.sgo.fi/2014/11/norway-spiral-revisited.html
Images, map and sources on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Norwegian_spiral_anomaly
Doug Ellison's computer simulation of how the spiral formed (YouTube): https://youtu.be/Zx8i5EfmYU4
James Oberg's tenth-anniversary article with photos and triangulation maps: https://dorkmission.blogspot.com/2019/12/tenth-anniversary-of-norway-spiral.html
The discussion of the triangulation and altitude estimates on Metabunk: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/norway-spiral-was-it-really-a-failed-missile-launch-or-was-it-haarp-eiscat.1120/

Australia, 2010

Baden West's photo in the Space.com article: https://space.com/8546-ufo-spotted-australia-private-rocket.html

Hawaii, 2023

The Subaru Telescope camera footage, in the NPR article: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/31/1152830311/flying-spiral-hawaii-spacex-launch

Europe and Hungary, 2025

Hungarian readers' photos via Telex, in the Eduline article: https://eduline.hu/campus-life/20250325%5FTitokzatos-spiral-az-egen-tegnap-este-SpaceX-ufok
Photos (e.g., from the Hamburg area) on the Időjárás és Radar site: https://www.idojarasesradar.hu/idojaras-info/a-spacex-hez-kotheto-misztikus-spiral-az-egbolton--25ab5442-05c0-4b14-9981-73849729be02
Footage from the Croatian (Plaški) sky camera and British photos in the PetaPixel article: https://petapixel.com/2025/03/25/giant-spacex-swirl-sparkles-across-swathes-of-europe/
Photos from northern Italy (Venice and surroundings): https://www.geopop.it/spirale-luminosa-cieli-italia-generata-da-razzo-falcon-9-spacex-spiegazione-e-foto/
Photo from France (Indre department): https://reporterre.net/Une-fusee-d-Elon-Musk-a-cree-une-spirale-bleue-dans-le-ciel

The sober take

The same physics lies behind every one of these spirals. It takes three things.

1. A spinning rocket stage with gas flowing out to the side. This can be intentional (the Falcon 9 releasing its remaining propellant) or a fault (in the Bulava's case, the failed stage). The best analogy is a rotating garden sprinkler: the water droplets fly straight outward, but because the head is turning, the line of droplets traces a spiral. The spiral itself doesn't rotate, only the point of release does. On top of that, the rocket is in space or at its edge, where there is no air resistance, so the particles hold the shape for a long time.

2. Sunlight up high, darkness on the ground. The spiral doesn't shine with its own light. The rocket is several hundred kilometers up, where the Sun is still shining, while below the observers it is already (or still) dark. That's why these phenomena are always seen at twilight: at dawn in 2009, and in the evening in 2025, roughly three hours after sunset. The same geometry is what makes satellites visible, too.

3. The “black hole” is just the sky. The dark spot appearing in the center of the spiral was the basis of most conspiracy theories: what else could swallow light but a wormhole? The answer is simple. When the gas release stops, the particles already released keep flying outward, and the center empties out. What you see there is the dark background sky.

Why blue? The fine ice crystals and combustion products scatter the shorter, blue wavelengths of sunlight more strongly, and this color stands out well against the twilight sky.

Why did it seem motionless? Because it was enormously far away. An object several hundred kilometers up, moving at several thousand kilometers per hour, seen from 800–1,500 kilometers away, drifts slowly across the sky like an airplane on the horizon.