Today in nothing to see here...

Great, now the overlords are going
to think I'm some kind of poser.

That terrifying streak of fire and light that arced across the California sky last night foretelling future calamity and certain doom? Yeah, I missed it too, but it was apparently all over the internet. People posted videos and Tweeted about it. But did anyone think to call me? No. For all I know this could have been the vanguard of an alien invasion and instead of greeting our new overlords and pledging my undying loyalty to them in exchange for being spared the great culling, I was at home. Watching goddamn Netflix.

Crazy lights in the sky have long been associated with predictions of disaster and what with a super-contentius election coming up, it's hard not to see why everyone's a little on edge about this. But this is the 21st century; an enlightened age where such phenomena have rational, scientific explanations.

Pictured: a depiction of Haley's Comet from the Bayeux tapestry. Notice the
ignorant medieval English savages freaking out in the lower left. Pfft...idiots, right?
Not pictured: the impending Norman Conquest that would shortly befall them.

Thanks Newton...

Last night's sky-horror for instance was probably just space junk falling out of orbit. Lt. Colonel Martin O'Donnell from the U.S. Strategic Air Command says what people saw was wreckage from a Chinese rocket that was launched last month and is only now raining down upon our defenseless planet. And apparently this happens all the time, like all the time. The obvious question then is how come we never notice? Fortunately, Colonel O'Donnell has an explanation for that too:

"Something this big enters in an uncontrolled way probably once a month. Mostly they fall into the ocean-- the Earth is a big place. The chance that you get one at night, over the U.S. at a time when people look at the sky -- it is relatively low."

-Lt. Colonel Martin O'Donnell,

colonel-splaining it to us

Pictured: A grim portent of unbelievable foreboding and horror.
Or possibly space junk. I don't know, I'm not a scientist.

Above: Eat your heart out NORAD.

See? No reason to panic. This isn't a Deep Impact situation or an invasion, it's just the uncontrolled reentry of a piece of Chinese military equipment that no one at Strategic Air Command noticed until they happened to catch it on someone's Periscope feed. Look, I'm not a fan of the military-industrial whatever, so take this with a grain of salt, but it kind of sounds like we could cut back a little on our massive defense budget and just rely on social media for all our early warning needs. Did I just solve America's budget problems? You're welcome.