It all started a little mysteriously in the Season 2 premiere of Fargo, when Kieran Culkin’s character, Rye Gerhardt, got distracted by some lights in the sky. The episode leaves those lights ambiguous, but by Episode 2 the lights are back, and the episode closes out with some mysterious lens flare, plus some lines from the alien-invasion classic The War of the Worlds: “No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.” So what’s the deal? Have aliens really invaded FX’s frosty Midwest crime drama?

The events of Fargo Season 2 take place in 1979 and, as Uproxx pointed out, there was a famous Minnesota U.F.O. sighting at the time known as “the Val Johnson incident.” In a recent interview with Minnesota’s NPR, Val Johnson himself recounted the sighting in the most Fargo-esque way you could imagine. “I looked up at the sky and said, ‘Well shucks, what happened?’ And then I shuffled on with my life.” The Val Johnson incident is far from the only U.F.O. incident to come out of the Midwest; in 1948 in Fargo, North Dakota, George F. Gorman, a W.W. II veteran and a pilot with the North Dakota Air National Guard, pursued an object that most scholars have since concluded was a weather balloon. So what do we have here in Fargo Season 2? A genuine out-of-this-world sighting? Or something more mundane, like the deflated Mylar birthday balloon Betsy and Molly found in Episode 2? We asked the cast and the creator for their thoughts on Fargo’s mysterious flashing lights.

Patrick Wilson (Lou Solverson): “Trust me that gets weirder in all honesty and I love that. It creates an awareness of curiosity of fear.”

Bokeem Woodbine (Mike Milligan): “It took me by surprise initially and then after a few moments, I just said, “You know what? That makes sense.’ Why wouldn’t there be? Of course, there would be maybe a ‘galactic’ connotation.”

Kirsten Dunst (Peggy Blomquist): “Well, I read it before I agreed to it. I got two episodes so . . . I laughed. It’s the time, like those kind of movies were coming out. Everyone was U.F.O. crazed, so I thought it was cool. But, yeah, that’s Noah. I think it’s just like he really went with it this season, you know?”

Cristin Milioti (Betsy Solverson): “I think that this show is so beautifully written. I didn’t bat an eye at that. I was like, ‘Yup. They know what they’re doing. Great. See you in space.’ Noah knows what he’s doing so I never even questioned it.”

Jesse Plemons (Ed Blomquist): “In the first episode you’re not really sure if it’s real or not. After spending some time with Noah, it didn’t come as that much of a surprise. He’s willing to go anywhere. We chuckled a bit about it.”

Jeffrey Donovan (Dodd Gerhardt): “[Creator Noah Hawley] wants the audience to believe what they want to believe. He always intended it to be a weather balloon. But in the 70s imagination and the fear that’s going on . . . that’s what’s playing on these people’s psyche, this kind of collective delusion and how impressionable they all are. I think it was more that than it was any aliens. I never felt that there were aliens. Also the xenophobia of not just that state but probably our whole country. Remember, we just came out of Khrushchev and Nixon and we’re terrified of the Cold War and Vietnam, and everyone foreign was always a threat. I think he was just trying to play into that.”