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There are 3 ways in which light can leave an object and enter your eye. The first is transmission. A transparent or translucent object will allow light from an external source to pass through it to you. Reflection is number 2. It’s the same as number 1 except the light comes from the same side as the observer.
The third is what is relevant here. The object can produce light. Light is produced when an excited electron relaxes (those are the real, physics terms for this phenomenon). If an electron absorbs some energy, it jumps up in energy level to an excited state. It wants to get rid of that excess energy to relax back down to its ground state. This released energy takes the form of a photon.
But the energy required to excite the electron can come from many different places. A lightbulb typically takes electrical energy to do this. But the electrons can absorb external photons from the flashlight, hold onto that energy for a while, then release it back out as the electrons relax.
Most typically, this happens better with UV light. UV is higher energy per photon than visible light. So if the electron takes 2 or 3 drops to get back to ground state, it releases 2 or 3 photons that have less energy each. So the electron absorbs one high energy photon and releases multiple lower energy photons. This may be the rare case where the energy gap the electrons are dropping is the same as the photons coming in. Or it could be the flashlight isn’t perfectly only emitting visible light. It could be emitting a few photons here and there in the UV spectrum too.
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