LEWISTON – Those mysterious flickering lights in the sky spied by a Florida doctor Friday night:

A dozen giant, flaming Chinese lanterns released to cap off a dance performance at Bates College.

“It was us!” laughed Bates Dance Festival Director Laura Faure.

Dr. Barry Chandler, who summers in Poland Spring, watched the string of lights for several minutes Friday night from his mother-in-law’s lawn on Marble Street. He’d described them as looking like flames from hot air balloons, but not quite.

He was convinced they weren’t part of a meteor shower, but was stumped at what they could be outside of UFOs.

“It’s a perfect explanation, one that I never would have guessed at in a million years,” Chandler said Tuesday.

Faure said the lanterns, which measured about 2 feet across and a foot tall, were released at the end of performances of “Paradise Pond” on Thursday and Friday night. They drift and float very high, eventually self-extinguish and disintegrate.

It was a site-specific piece, using lots of dancers and Lake Andrews as a backdrop, and won’t be performed there again, Faure said.

Crystal Anttila of Lewiston said she looked up while driving across the Veterans Bridge from Auburn to Lewiston about the same time Chandler did on Friday night and remembered having the same reaction as Chandler.

“They looked like flames, like fallen flames,” she said. “I’m going, ‘What is that?'”

Jennifer McClure-Groover, outside looking for her lost cat, had a couple of lanterns land near her Ernest Street home.

“It was the most bizarre thing ever,” she said. “One fell on the neighbor’s lawn. It had extinguished, but you could tell it had burned.”

She and her sister asked each other, “What on earth is this?” Her sister took a few photos and sent them to McClure-Groover’s brother-in-law, a pilot on an Air Force base in South Dakota.

“He was really intrigued,” she said.

It wasn’t until she searched online that she was able to figure out the floating things were the burned remains of white Chinese lanterns. She still didn’t know where they came from.

“It was just sort of parachuting down slowly and gracefully,” McClure-Groover said. Pretty, but creepy.

The temporary mystery allowed for a little fun, with Sun Journal bloggers debating whether it was ball lightning or alien spies.