Satellites have sent in strange pictures of a series of mysterious lights that have appeared in middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The lights are uniformly yellow in color and appear to be clustered close together in the middle of the Atlantic, close to the coast of nearby South America. Imaginative viewers already speculate that they may be a slew of dangerous bioluminescent underwater creatures slowly making their way towards the shore to end all humankind, but experts have a shockingly simple explanation for the weird sightings.

"There are no human settlements there, nor fires or gas wells," NASA explains, "but there are an awful lot of fishing boats."

The mysterious lights in the middle of the Atlantic are apparently a gathering of fishing boats, not a murderous species of sea creature of underwater UFOs.

The strange lights in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean have been spotted by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, a program on the Suomi NPP satellite.

From space, the lights appear like a strain of underwater UFOs, but are actually a large group of fishermen whose boats are close together.

But are fishing boats really supposed to be that bright? NASA explains why the fishermen have brought out their strongest night lights into the Atlantic Ocean:

"The night fishermen are hunting for Illex Argentinus, a species of short-finned squid that forms the second largest squid fishery on the planet. The squid are found tens to hundreds of kilometers offshore from roughly Rio de Janeiro to Tierra del Fuego (22 to 54 degrees South Latitude). They live 80 to 600 meters below the surface, feeding on shrimp, crabs and fish. In turn, Illex are consumed by larger finfish, whales, seals, sea birds, penguins...and humans"

The fishermen then use the lights, which generate as much as 300 kilowatts of light per fishing boat, to tempt the plankton that the Illex squid love to eat, to the surface of the water. The Illex squid then follow the food, and the fishermen then have a bountiful catch.

So the next time you spot some strange lights in the middle of an ocean, they might just be fishermen looking for squid.