A swirling spiral of light seen in the skies over Israel, Syria and other Middle East countries on Thursday night has been linked to a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile test.

Hundreds of Israelis jammed police hotlines with reports of the unidentified flying object, according to Ynetnews. Sighting reports came from Lebanon and even Armenia and Turkey. Versions of the video, captioned in Arabic, began appearing on YouTube.

Some of the reports that popped up on Twitter suggested that the lights in the sky were seen as a good omen for Syria's revolution. Others worried that it was a bad omen for Syria, potentially signaling the use of chemical weapons.

The actual explanation is almost certainly more mundane: The Voice of Russia reported that the country's Strategic Missile Forces conducted a test of the Topol ICBM from the Kapustin Yar firing range near Astrakhan in southern Russia on Thursday. Such a launch could theoretically be seen from areas of the Middle East and the Caucasus.

Citing a report from RIA Novosti, the radio service said the missile "accurately hit its target" in a Kazakh firing range. However, Ynetnews quoted Yigal Pat-El, chairman of the Israel Astronomical Association, as saying the missile "most likely spun out of control, and its remnants and the fuel was what people saw."

The video was reminiscent of other "space spirals" that occur when rocket stages release burning fuel as they spin. One such spiral was sighted over Norway in 2009, and turned out to be caused by a failed ballistic missile test. In that case, the missile that went awry was a Bulava ICBM, launched from a submarine in the White Sea.

Another spiral was sighted in Russia the following night and captured on video. That one was caused by a Topol missile test, but the test was reported as a success. At the time, NBC News space analyst James Oberg said he had indications that the Topol's "third-stage spin is a 'feature,' not a malfunction, and may be associated with guidance, or decoy deploy, or enhancing hardness against U.S. boost-phase antimissile weapons."

Update for 3 p.m. ET June 8: In an email, Oberg says the video appears to show the normal ascent of a Russian ICBM. Here's his explanation:

"The 'spiral' does not look to me to be a sign of a 'failed missile test' — it has been a common visual feature of Russian missile launches for more than 30 years and seems associated with a roll maneuver to 'dump' unwanted surplus thrust for short-range test flights. Since you can't shut down a solid fuel rocket early, you need to find a way to dump thrust so you don't overshoot a target.

"One way is to open portals on the sides of the rocket as it burns — sending much of the thrust out to the sides. Two opposite facing portals are usually installed, to counterbalance the thrust and not knock it off course.

"A careful analysis of the infamous 'Norway spiral' several years ago shows twin plumes emerging from the central object, in opposite directions. An alternate method is just to pitch the rocket off 'straight ahead' and then corkscrew, so as to spray some of the thrust off to the sides and keep your speed down to what you really need. Otherwise you'll overshoot your intended target.

"This launch was from the Volga River Kapustin Yar test range, active since 1947, but ICBM tests are infrequent. Direction was east, headed for the Sary Shagan impact zone in Kazakhstan, normally used only for testing anti-missile radars and interceptor missiles. That's hardly more than 2,000 kilometers away, so the test clearly wasn't of the missile itself but of its warhead's 'penaids' — penetration aids to frustrate tracking and targeting by U.S. anti-missile systems. This would result in a very unusual trajectory to get up to full ICBM speed without overshooting the target zone — probably lofted a lot higher than normal and then headed back down towards the target zone while still thrusting.

"The range from Kazakhstan to Israel isn't that great — the missile got 'above the horizon' from Israel pretty quickly, even with Earth's curvature.

"Another contributing factor: It's June — near the time of the 'midnight sun' in northern latitudes. That means sunlight is streaming over the pole, throughout the night. Something in the northern sky above the atmosphere over Kazakhstan would be backlit by that sunlight.

"These 'accidental' factors combined to make this show possible. And the widespread availability of pocket camcorders made recording it much more common than in the past."

Other rocket-related UFO sightings:

• December 2009: Another 'UFO' from Russia
• January 2010: Did missile test spark Chinese UFO sightings?
• June 2010: 'UFO' over Australia was likely caused by SpaceX rocket

Tip o' the Log to Huffington Post's Craig Kanalley. Twitter updates on the sighting are using the hashtag #MideastUFO.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

PLoS ONE

These three graves from the Middle Epipalaeolithic cemetery of 'Uyun al-Hammam in Jordan are from the earliest known cemetery in the Middle East, if not the world.

A 16,500-year-old cemetery with human remains — buried alongside those of a red fox — suggests humans may have had a soft spot for the animals well before dogs became man's best friend.

The site at 'Uyun al-Hammam in northern Jordan is the earliest known formal burial ground in the Middle East, pre-dating other cemeteries in the region by a few millennia, scientists from Canada and the UK report in a new study published in PLoS ONE.

"This may be the earliest known cemetery period," Edward Banning, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who is leading the excavations, told me today. "It probably depends on what you mean by cemetery."

The site is certainly the earliest known in the Middle East where people were repeatedly buried with grave goods such as mortars and pestles, a bone spoon, animal parts and red ochre, an iron mineral commonly sprinkled on bodies in prehistoric times, Banning noted.

Fox finds
Beyond the site's age, the researchers were intrigued by the presence of a red fox that was used in two burials. "This whole thing was buried with one person and then later on part of that fox is removed from that burial and put in another burial," Banning said.

The graves also have bones of other animals, but only the fox bones were treated in the same way as the humans. Both, for example, were sprinkled with red ochre. And in the original burial, the fox was completely interred, not just parts as is often the case with food offerings.

Banning cautioned that the significance of the fox can't be known for sure, but given strong similarities to the way dogs were treated in Natufian burials a few thousand years later, a pet-like analogy rises to the surface.

"It is tempting to think they thought of the fox as more or less equivalent to the dog in some way, because we tend to think of dogs at least eventually becoming man's best friend and pets," Banning said.

The connection isn't too great of a stretch, he added. Both dogs and foxes are canines, for one, and researchers know that foxes, while skittish and timid, can be tamed. What's more, early domesticated dogs in the Middle East were about the same size as the red fox.

"It would not be terribly surprising that they tamed foxes at least occasionally, it's just there is no way for us to prove it was tamed," he said.

Social complexity
The cemetery finding also indicates that elaborate mortuary rituals took place much earlier than previously believed and in cultures that were clearly nomadic hunter-gatherers. "It suggests that farming wasn't necessary to have that kind of level of social complexity," Banning said.

Though the people at 'Uyun al-Hammam were nomadic, the cemetery indicates ties to particular places in the landscape. The living space around the cemetery was a well-used campsite.

"Maybe because they associated it with their ancestors, it became their burial place. As they moved around this landscape, they kept coming back there to bury their dead. That's kind of interesting too, because it suggests a territoriality that is difficult to document earlier than this," he said.

More stories on early Middle East culture:

• Beer may have lubricated the rise of civilization
• Scientists pinpoint origins of little dogs
• Ancient Nubians drank beer laced with antibiotics
• Headless skeletons found in ancient grave