They wrote on Reddit under the name MᴀssacreYKS: “We stargaze, like to take amateur pictures of the sky etc.

“I posted this on another thread and he said as the night mode was used to take the picture.

“It keeps the shutter open longer and this is most likely a plane with two lights along the side and flashing red light in the centre.

“The camera shutter stayed open long enough to capture the middle light flashing.”

Baffled social media users soon rushed to give their two cents on the strange images which were taken on an iPhone 10 on October 21.

One wrote: “The long thing looks like a satellite in low Earth orbit.

“It would need to be pretty low to be seen so clearly, but it’s not all that unusual to see satellites after dark, since the sun would be reflecting on them.

“The only thing I find strange is that it is so low that you can make it out quite well. The other lights could be stars.”

A second added: “Hmm, you know what’s happening is we’re living in 2021 and everyone in the universe is arriving to see our extinction.”

One user even went so far as to speculate that the UFO may be similar to those allegedly spotted in 1561 and documented in the Nuremberg UFO painting.

The person said: “Looks very similar to the objects in the Nuremberg UFO painting of the sighting they had in 1561.”

The Nuremberg painting was published in newspapers in April 1561 – and is thought to depict a mᴀss sighting of UFOs.