Incident: 13 February 2026, before dawn, South Australia. Reported viewpoints included Largs Bay, Seaview and Strathalbyn.
Two bright beams above South Australia prompted questions about their source. The contemporary report favoured rocket exhaust, providing an opportunity to compare a local sky account with the launch operator’s mission record.
The local report
Gertie Spurling’s 7News account, published 13 February, describes an early-morning display seen from several places. It reported expert suggestions that the light was most likely exhaust associated with an Ariane 6 launch from French Guiana.
The report does not supply a named observer-by-observer timing table or a surveyed track. UKPX therefore keeps the related locations together as one reported display, rather than treating every town or reused clip as an independent event.
The launch record
Arianespace’s own announcement confirms that the first Ariane 64, using four boosters, launched 32 Amazon Leo satellites on mission VA267/LE-01. Liftoff was 16:45 UTC on 12 February. In Adelaide’s daylight-saving time, that was 03:15 on 13 February.
This explains why a European-dated launch release and an Australian report can refer to different calendar dates without contradicting each other. The operator also supplies the mission’s deployment information. It does not, in that announcement, identify particular South Australian photographs as its exhaust.
The strength of the association
The launch and its timing are established by the operator’s primary record. The explanation of the Australian light is the interpretation carried by 7News. Those two statements have different evidential roles and are kept separate here.
UKPX has not obtained a flight ephemeris or independently reconstructed the sight lines from all three localities. It would therefore be too strong to present this page as our own exact optical identification of a particular stage or plume. The contemporary proposed explanation remains useful when its attribution and limits are visible.
Map and imagery
The pin uses a checked public jetty reference in Largs Bay. The South Australian heritage record separately identifies the public jetty location. The point represents a reported locality, not an exhaust position in the atmosphere.
Launch photographs and local news footage have not been copied under an assumed licence. A checked reusable jetty photograph was found, but the image could not be retrieved during this pass; the article can be read alongside the linked originals without substituting invented evidence.
Location and source record
Approximate public Largs Bay jetty reference for one reported locality; not a filmer’s exact position or the location of rocket exhaust. Reports also came from Seaview and Strathalbyn. Coordinates follow the checked geographical reference.
UKPX reference added 6 November 2026. Incident year: 2026. Browse Historical Cases · More UFO / UAP / USO references.