Facinating
Giant Lightning to Space
What are we to think about giant lightning bolts to space? Can we think of space as neutral or empty in the face of these spectacular discharges?
The pilots who saw it wouldn’t talk about it for fear of ridicule or worse. The pilots whose airplanes were hit by it wouldn’t talk about it because they were dead. Then in the early 1990s investigators began to take the rumors seriously and to look for evidence of lightning above the clouds.
Right away they found images on archived satellite pictures, and they recorded hundreds of flashes above distant storms. Giant neon-light-like haloes would appear 85 kilometers above storms. The glows would propagate downward to form red balloons of interlaced filaments. The currents would squeeze into 30-meter-wide channels scattered over areas of a hundred square kilometers and disappear into the clouds. The glows were so diffuse that they seemed hardly a danger to airplanes. The investigators named them “sprites”......."