The Bayanday Spheres

Where the lights came down, the account says, residents found nothing but smoke and a foul smell. The archive's telling describes eight shining spheres seen from several villages in the Bayanday district of Irkutsk Oblast in February 2011. They moved between the villages and hung above the treeline. They lined up in a row, changed shape, broke apart and merged again. Then they descended with a loud noise. The account adds that the display returned on Friday evenings at around eight o'clock and that students from the village of Vasilyevka were among those watching.

What is on the record

Two videos from one channel carry the story. Its two claimants are the Vasilyevka students and the local residents. Both are groups, so the count says little about how many individuals saw anything, and no one is named.

Only one outside origin has turned up. English-language tabloid retellings from 2011 say that police and rescue services in Irkutsk took many calls about lights and a loud explosion over Bayanday. Those retellings describe a pink and blue glowing object crashing with a bang. They do not mention eight spheres or Friday evenings. The February date and the village names appear only in the archive's own source.

The same news cycle carried the so-called dead alien in the snow video from Irkutsk, which was widely judged a hoax. Nothing in the record ties the Bayanday reports to that video. The overlap in time and region is still worth knowing. No official explanation of the lights is on file.

Why it sits where it does

On paper this is L3, the tier for independent witnesses to one connected event. The paper is thin: two unnamed groups reached through a single channel, and an outside record of one tabloid origin that tells a different story. The tier here measures how the sources are counted, not how firm the event is. What the villagers saw over the trees is not resolved here.