CCTV in north west Russia captures the moment an unexplained flash which momentarily turned night into day.

A HUGE and blinding flash that lit up several Russian for a fraction of a second is causing heated debate.

UFO watchers have already turned out in force to blame it on extraterrestrials after government officials admitted they had no explanation for the flash.

But CCTV cameras across the region around the city of Petrozavodsk in Russia’s Republic of Karelia all captured the blinding flash as it lit up the night sky.

Members of the astronomic club Asterion believe that it may have been caused by an electrical problem at a nearby railway station, but this has been denied by representatives of the local October Railway.

Another suggested it could have been a single lightning strike but this was also rejected by meteorologists.

But for UFO watchers the source was clear, and that it was provoked by something above the clouds bursting into the Earth’s atmosphere.

They were given some encouragement by a local professor of astronomy, Andrey Mezentsev, who said: “There are two possibilities, it could had been space garbage or a space bolide (an extremely bright meteor). We need time to collect all the recordings and put them together in order to get a bigger picture of what actually occurred.”

UFO watchers have also asked people with cameras to send video footage if they managed to capture the flash.