sott.net: On May 13, 2020, a couple of hours after sunset, Stephen Hummel - an astronomer at the famous University of Texas Observatory - noticed a flash of lightning from a distant thunderstorm.
“I saw a large column of sprites jumping in the sky and rushed to set up the camera,” he says. Pointing the camera southeast towards the city of Alpine, he recorded this film:
The video shows alternating streaks of red and green light gliding overhead like ripples in a giant puddle of water. At the same time, red flashes of upward lightning (sprites) flashed so brightly that "I could see them with the naked eye," says the astronomer. "It was a fantastic show."
Shooting skies in the countryside of Southwest Texas can be quite risky. Hummel says:
“I had just climbed to the top of the ridge for a better view and was a little out of breath as I set up my camera. And suddenly, at that moment I heard a terrible roar of a mountain lion. I turned on the camera and immediately ran away, returning to a safe area. Later I returned for the trophies and took both the camera and the footage. And I was amazed at the results - the airy glow was so obvious."
Editorial comment
Promotional video:
The story about the mountain lion is really impressive and one can only imagine a poor astronomer running away from lion bites - gleaming with glasses and glistening with a sweaty bald head. And most importantly, he threw at the mercy of a technological relic that was handed to him. A Soviet astronomer would never have done this with a scientific instrument, but grabbed a tripod and fought the predator to the end.
However, if we discuss all this seriously, then the sprites were 180 kilometers from the nearest thunderstorm:
From here it is not very clear - to what they were dragged at all? Why haven't you seen the thunderstorm in Great Britain as well? It could also give glare, since the UK is a US ally. The explanation about lightning is of approximately the same order of natural science idiocy.
Finally, another mysterious episode is the exceptional rarity of sprites as an atmospheric phenomenon. If they could be regularly observed and filmed like this, they would have been opened a little earlier than in 1989. And they were only seen and filmed a week ago in Brazil, where a UFO crashed shortly thereafter. Therefore, the source of the "sprites" was most likely an object of this kind:
The recording was made live from the ISS on May 15, 2020. And in total, a search only on YouTube, only for the last week and only in Texas, immediately finds about twenty videos with pepelats:
And all over Texas in recent years what has not flown - the state, apparently, for the "Martians" is some extremely interesting. Therefore, the "sprites" are most likely the result of the interaction of the atmosphere and some hefty spacecraft.
What he was doing there is not very clear, nevertheless, we are not very sure that the frightened astronomer heard exactly the cougar. It is quite possible that some Predator landed there and yelled at the whole forest, challenging the Astronomer and inviting him to play a deer and a hunter. But the deer did not tempt fate and decided to run away to a safe distance, leaving behind a TV camera. She followed the development of events.
