Nobody is sure what it was, but for more than three hours Monday, a neon-green light floated above homes in Boca Raton.

   A police officer drove out to see what was the fuss Monday. “One of the officers said he saw the green light,” a spokeswoman for the department told TCPalm.

   “It pretty much darted across the sky, it zig-zagged a bunch of times, did a bunch of crazy flips,” said Ryan Helfrich, 19. He said about 40 neighbors came outside and watched the lights float about a half-block from where it was first spotted. They said the object just “faded away” after midnight.

   Eric Vandernoot, an astronomer at Florida Atlantic University, guessed that it could have been a hoax. He said someone could have flashed a green laser onto a balloon or something else floating in the sky.

   “It sounds like it might be a balloon, a weather balloon,” said Dwayne Brown, a NASA spokesman. “We certainly get our share of calls. Some of the times it can be anything from a piece of falling debris from somewhere. It could be a meteorite.”