It’s around 8 a.m. on April 27, 2022. A woman outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is relaxing in her hot tub, lulled into a quiet calm as her horses neigh in the distance. Suddenly, a blinding red-yellow light shoots across the sky. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a man stuck in traffic sees the same light ignite the heavens — “like a welder’s torch,” he’d later write in an eyewitness account. Moments later, a series of sonic booms thunder across southwestern Mississippi so loudly that NASA would equate the event to the detonation of three tons of TNT. Local officials in Vicksburg assure worried residents that the nearby nuclear power plant hasn’t exploded. Indeed, there is no earthly reason for the booming light show that erupted across the southern United States that Wednesday morning. This event is wholly extraterrestrial…

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