A bright light seen streaking across the skies of California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Colorado wasn't, as you might have hoped, aliens coming to deliver us from the mess that is 2016. In fact, in a revelation that's par for this year's course, it wasn't even a meteorite: It was trash. Space trash, but still, trash.

Witnesses reported seeing the lights flash across the skies of at least five western states at around 9:47 p.m. Pacific Time, sending them straight to various social media platforms for speculation, conspiracy-mongering, and blurry photos and video.

A spokesperson with the California Highway Patrol says that they received "hundreds" of calls regarding the lights across the state from people afraid that the blaze was an airliner in distress.

Others noted that the Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower was set to peak Wednesday evening, leading many to speculate that that was the fireball they were witnessing was a meteorite entering our orbit.

Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News Dylan Kuhlmann says that "Even after deciding it was a meteor, it was unnerving," Kuhlmann said.

"We all agreed that if the world wasn't ending, it was an awesome experience just watching it fly."

Speaking with ABC 7, Livermore, CA resident Bryan Fagundes says that "From the west sky we saw this shooting star coming across from the east."

"I thought about making a wish, but then it kept going. One of the neatest things I've seen in a while."

According to US Strategic Command spokesperson Julie Ziegenhorn, a Chinese CZ-7 rocket re-entered the atmosphere at the time the bright lights were spotted, but when contacted by SFist she would not confirm that the fireball was definitely the rocket, saying that we should "contact the Chinese authorities."

Jonathan McDowell, a scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was less circumspect, asserting that the lights were indeed that now-decaying rocket, reentering the earth's atmosphere in one last blaze of glory before its demise.

(McDowell, a prolific tweeter, goes on at length regarding the dead rocket. You can take in all his thoughts here.)

Spaceflight Now, which characterized the light show as "space junk from China’s newest satellite launcher," says that "the relatively slow speed of the fireball — it took nearly a minute to cross the sky — ruled out a natural origin."

If McDowell is correct in his estimates of the rocket's size of 6 metric tons, it's "among the largest objects to come back to Earth unguided over the last few years."

And by object, we mean garbage. beautiful, flaming space garbage.