LIDAR?
Could that have been a LIDAR experiment and getting "hit" was just bad luck? As far as I know you need to get a permission before you do that kind of stuff, but then at the physics institute I was working at they did these experiments (with obviously rather powerful lasers, no way to overlook the bright beam from half a km away even though it was pointed up) very near to the flight path of planes coming in to THF, which was less then 10 km (6 miles) away.