Hundreds of people report seeing a UFO over Houston, Texas

And not just one image. Hundreds of people reported seeing a ring of blinking lights in the sky above Houston, Texas, during a lightning storm last week and plenty of them had cameras.

Photographs and videos of the event have been circulating on social media, generating so much interest on social media that the Huffington Post actually ran a poll on “The Texas UFO”.

Some of the best footage was recorded by Houston musician Andrew Pena, who says he was videoing the spectacular lightning show while driving along the Interstate 45 freeway in the city’s south and didn’t realise what he had until he played it back at home.

The video, which shows a circle of brightly coloured lights moving around in the sky, has been declared both “amazing” and “nothing” by UFO-logists and sceptics alike.

“I think the trick with UFOs is figuring out what else they could be,” Dr. Carolyn Summers, vice president for astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, told KPRC-TV.

“It’s easy to say that it could be aliens. The more people who see it in different directions, the more likely we are to figure out where it is, what it is, and see if we can explain it.”

Mutual UFO Network chief investigator Fletcher Gray dismissed the object as “no more than light trapped in the side window” of Mr Pena’s car.

The UFO was reportedly hovering less than 20km from the Johnson Space Center, leading others to speculate it could have been NASA testing its latest toy, a “supersonic flying saucer” which was launched from Hawaii on June 28.

The device, officially named Low Density Supersonic Decelerator, imitates the rapid inflation technique of the Hawaiian puffer fish as a way to protect spacecraft during landings.

The aim is to reduce the speed of descending spacecraft, making it easier to land on planets like Mars.

Other theories include a weather balloon, the reflection of a street light, stadium lights and an unmanned drone but so far there has been no official explanation and no word from NASA.