A Space X rocket was seen over the UK last night, forming a spiral due to a fuel dump.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c7vzpmjm9vlo

Several interesting factors to this;

The launch was for a classified (secret) mission,

.The spiral moved quite quickly across the sky, and was only visible for a few minutes. Since it was in, or near, orbital height, this is as expected.
. I didn't see it myself, but it was all over Facebook within minutes.
.Someone who did see it said it was much easier to see using a smartphone; this is an interesting factor- smartphones are very good at picking up faint phenomena in the sky, like the Northern lights. Smartphones also seem to exaggerate ordinary, distant planes into bright, nearby 'drones', so they are a mixed blessing.

It has been seen in Italy too

https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2...to_il_mistero-424084672/?ref=RHRM-BG-P1-S1-T1

Sightings in Italy of a luminous spiral: mystery solved.

The luminous spiral seen in the sky yesterday evening in many places in Italy, expecially the notth-east, is no more a mystery. It's a stripe of propellant released for the Falcon9 SpaceX motor, which took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the governative satellite NROL69 on board. The event - also called "deorbit burn" or "venting" has been seen in Europe too and it's the release of excess propellant before the destructive reentry of the rocket in atmosphere, to make it more stable during the planned fall.

PS.: I translated it as it is, I don't vouch for it to be exact.

I managed to see about the last 5 seconds of this. A friend in my village messaged the one person she knew who'd be able to identify it instantly - me! I ran outside and just saw a fuzzy blob disappear towards the east into the Earth's shadow.

The whole event just shows that when something really weird happens in the sky there are enough smartphones around for people to get good and multiple images of it.

My wife and I have watched two or three SpaceX launches from Vandenberg (some 250 miles north of us) go "over" our neighborhood here in San Diego. Once I could also see the firing as the first stage headed back over the ocean for recovery. Silent, of course, and easy to miss if you're not looking up for the minute they're overhead.

Hey, I live in the northern hemisphere and I missed it.
On the plus side, if you're in Oz or NZ you're probably out of range of all the pesky solid-fuelled rockets the Russian government has, which probably don't make pretty patterns.

Also for when people say we don't get good photos of UAPs because modern cell phones have bad cameras.

Here are some more examples of second-stage launch, this time, a Russian Soyuz launch