Norway Spiral Did people really believe it to be a Russian Nuke?

Whatever happened to real journalism, there was a time they would go mad for a story like this. Something was seen by millions in the sky over Norway on the 9th of Dec 2009 that has never before been seen in our skies.

For the first 24 hours images where flooding the internet about this Spiral in the sky, then just like magic the images started vanishing one by one from news, internet and TV, until no more could be found on any search engine for at least 10 days until thousands started screaming about censorship. The images started appearing again online with a weak explanation that it took time for search engines to update the images.

So what caused this spectacular sight that night out over Norway? The official story was announced, The Russians had launched a missile which went out of control.

No big breaking news about the Russians launching missiles near populated areas, and didn't they during the first few days deny this to be the case?
Why did they change their minds and confirm the story later?

It seems to have worked though, the news was buried and over the coming months more spirals appeared in different countries but are they the same? Personally I don't think they look anything like what happened over Norway on the 9th of Dec 2009.