SpaceX’s Starship SN5 during a flight test conducted in early August. Credit: Twitter / SpaceX

Some San Antonio residents reported seeing a single-file line of white lights crawling across the night sky Monday, leading some South Texas Reddit users to speculate that aliens were buzzing the city.

But, alas, it was nothing more than billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, according to a KSAT report.

Musk’s SpaceX company launched 34 Starlink satellites from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, bringing the total number of the satellites in orbit to more than 2,000, according to the TV station

Just the same, Redditors were full of fanciful speculation about the source of the lights over the Alamo City.

“That’s the mothership,” Reddit user @sad_seal commented on the video posted by fellow Redditor The_anonymous_wolf under the r/San Antonio social media thread.

“Well, if it were aliens, Texas would just put them on a bus and send them to Chicago,” Reddit user Fit-Firefighter-329 quipped, referencing Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial migrant bussing program.

A Reddit user in the Rio Grande Valley town of Progresso also claims to have witnessed the otherworldly phenomena, while Austin’s KXAN confirmed reports of Starlink sightings across Central Texas.

The Starlink satellites, which Musk hopes will bring “high speed, low-latency broadband internet” to the most rural and remote parts of the globe, can be seen circling the Earth on cloudless nights. Websites such as Find Starlink allow interested parties to track their paths.

Musk hopes one day to have as many as 42,000 Starlink satellites orbiting the globe. Even so, regulators such as the Federal Communications Commission have expressed concern about the orbiting gear colliding with other space debris, according to Space.com.

The most recent Starlink launch was scrubbed Tuesday due to lightning at Cape Canaveral.

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This article appears in Sep 7-20, 2022.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...