If it was a space based laser or maser with the intent of doing damage to something on the ground it would have either been scattered by the cloud cover, or there would have been an odd sounding thunder (sonic boom) from the beam rapidly heating the water vapor. A laser in the visible or near visible region on either side of the spectrum would have also caused a very bright flash in the clouds from partial scattering and/or excitation. I am not sure if a maser weapon would cause such a flash in the clouds but it most likely would. This is evidenced by the flash that can bee seen in the air. If a normally invisible maser can excite the air enough to produce a visible flash it would probably do the same to water vapor or at least the air the vapor is in. The odd sounding thunder would happen either way though, as microwaves work quite well on water as we all know from the box sitting in most of our kitchens. Not to burst a bubble but, this is probably lightning and an out of focus (focused on the hear palm) camera. While I am 99.8% sure that at least a few world governments have space based energy weapons they would need to be using a frequency range that 1. has minimal absorption/attenuation from the gasses found in our atmosphere and 2. can deliver a maximum amount of that energy to the target. These two points are not trivial inconveniences but major hurdles that can break a billion/trillion dollar platform. Point three may be even harder than that. Finding a way to produce the required power to not only fire such a weapon but, to have enough energy that after all losses between generation to target to still have enough energy to do something to the target. Solar panels work better in space but are still very inefficient and would require massive sails of panels (very visible and easy target) and still have a long "reload" (single max power shot) or "clip change" (a few <100% of power shots) time while the batteries recharge. Making the panels smaller would only increase this time. Nuclear power in the way it is done here on the ground is incredibly heavy and complex. So much so that I doubt we can do it in orbit yet. Perhaps a mini thorium reactor? The other nuclear option that *is* used in space is thermo-electric generation whereby the heat of the decay of a sample of a radio active material is directly captured and converted to electricity. These things are inefficient as fuck and would require a great number of them (1,000s) to produce enough power to run such a weapon. Creating a huge number of points of failure and radiating enough heat you could probably see it with a cheap thermal camera at night. Lastly, once you get into certain frequency ranges and output powers you run the risk of destroying the lenses and/or the lasing material thus destroying the weapon or, at the very least requiring regular maintenance upping cost and the risk of your enemy discovering where your weapon is, making it a target.