[4] According to sources, it looked like a blue light coming from behind a mountain, stopping in mid-air, and starting to spiral outwards.

Norwegian celebrity astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard pointed out the area over which the light had been observed was exceptionally large, covering all of Northern Norway and Trøndelag.

[citation needed] UFO enthusiasts immediately began speculating whether the aerial light display could be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence proposing among other things that it could be a wormhole opening up, or somehow was linked to the recent high-energy experiments undertaken at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

"[9] Russian defence analyst Pavel Felgenhauer stated to AFP that "such lights and clouds appear from time to time when a missile fails in the upper layers of the atmosphere and have been reported before ... At least this failed test made some nice fireworks for the Norwegians.

"[11] Prior to the Russian statement, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had already suggested that the unusual light display occurred when the missile's third stage nozzle was damaged, causing the exhaust to come out sideways and sending the missile into a spin.