There has been a series of orb UFO sightings in Rotorua on New Zealand’s North Island this year with several videos posted on YouTube.
The most recent sighting was around 9:30 p.m. on June 2 when a man saw a strange light above his farm. Upon driving closer to take a look, he saw “a big ball of energy pulsing colors of yellow, pinky purple” and the object changed from flat to round, he wrote in the YouTube video description.
Brian Hurren, Vice-President of Rotorua Astronomical Society told local newspaper The Daily Post that the video was interesting but that “there is usually a reasonable explanation for everything.”
"It just looked like an out-of-focus star," he said, adding that it could also be a plasma ball, which is a ball of gas, although they are rare in New Zealand.
UFO Seen Over Rotorua in February
The incident led Rotorua local Andrea Colledge to contact The Daily Post with two videos of UFOs from earlier this year. Colledge said she had seen others, but had only filmed these two.
The sightings are too low to be a satellite. A Christchurch resident told the newspaper that one explanation for the UFO seen in June was the space shuttle Endeavour re-entering Earth’s atmosphere on its way to Florida.
"It came across the Indian Ocean and under Tasmania and then up to the left of New Zealand,” he said. "So what you saw was the end view of the shuttle with the re-entry flare.""The other thing often seen is weather balloons that grow in size as they get higher and they catch the moonlight and so appear as a object and then suddenly shoot off at [the] end as they deflate," the man added. UFO Seen Over Rotorua in April