When, during the first voyage of Columbus, the crew of his ship was tired of sailing into the unknown and she was ready to remove the captain, Columbus announced that the land was very close and that the sailor who saw it first would have a decent life pension upon returning home. At night he was awakened by the watchman, who saw some kind of glow in the sea. Columbus ordered to keep a course straight for him, until the glow took the form of a high tongue of a burning candle or torch. Deciding that he saw a fire lit on the shore, Columbus informed the team that he was approaching the long-awaited shore.
The debate about what exactly Columbus saw does not stop until now, but experts in atmospheric electricity argue that it was a rather rare and very eerie near-by phenomenon of a moving light column. In any case, it was recorded for the first time in the Spanish maritime chronicle of the 16th century.
Just half a century after the aforementioned voyage of Columbus, the Spanish ship "San Sebastian", loaded with booty from the shores of the newly discovered continent, was only 200 miles from its native shores. In such a situation, the sailors look more forward than back, and the crew almost missed the appearance behind the stern of the "fiery ghost" - a running light column. Despite the desperate maneuvers, the "pole" was rapidly catching up with the ship. Then the captain ordered to lower all the sails (apparently, so that they would not be burnt by the running fire), and the crew to pray earnestly. Prayer seems to have worked - the fiery "devil" rushed alongside the ship and soon disappeared over the horizon.
However, the light pole is not averse to scare modern sailors. In 1977 the publication of the famous writer and sailor Gabrilovich appeared in the Polish magazine "Pshekrui". In it, he told about the strange incident with the Polish ship "Kopalnja Walbrzych", which took place in 1970. Moreover, in almost the same area - between the Spanish port of Valencia and the island of Mallorca. The ship was quietly going about its business, when suddenly a greedy object in the form of a vertical column of light chased after it. When a collision seemed almost inevitable, this object responded to five desperate light and sound signals from a Polish ship with the same five flashes, accompanied by "incredibly strange sounds - as if five huge drops of oil were breaking on a concrete slab", after which it changed course and melted into darkness …
It should be noted that with a much higher frequency "pillars of fire" are observed on land and even underground. In a letter published at one time in "Technics - Youth", the miner A. Varavin from the town of Rudny, Kustanai region, recalls the incident he observed in 1942 at a copper mine in the town of Dzhezkazgan.
“Going down into the mine and moving a little away from the shaft, I looked around and suddenly saw that a bright purple beam about 15 millimeters thick and about a meter long was slowly descending from the ceiling to the floor. Behind him, at a distance of 10 centimeters, a second similar beam was moving. They passed almost next to me and went deep into the earth's thickness. I went back to the mine shaft and asked the stem man if he had seen the rays. He confirmed that he had seen. Honestly, I was scared for some reason."
In 1979, a similar phenomenon was observed on Uracha in the Kholodnaya cave, candidate of geological and mineralogical sciences Danilov with two satellites.
“Suddenly, right before our eyes, in the ceiling and opposite in the floor of the cave, something appeared that resembled a stalactite and stalagmite growing towards each other, but formed as if by frozen rays of light. Although the word "frozen" is not entirely appropriate here; The "rays" quickly rushed towards each other until they met (with a sharp increase in brightness for one or two seconds) and formed a single, glowing like a blue neon tube, a beam with a very clear outline of the outer border.
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After standing for some time (about ten seconds) in immobility, the beam began to slowly shift, moving away from us to the far corner of the cave. At the same time, its brightness practically did not change. When, according to our estimates, the beam should have already reached the wall of the cave opposite from us, it suddenly suddenly went out, as if someone had turned it off. At the same time, there was a sharp click …"
The Chinese argue that it is better to see once than hear or read a hundred times. The one-of-a-kind photograph of the light column was taken by eyewitness A. Larionov, a photographer by profession. Unlike many of his colleagues, he not only did not forget to charge the camera, but even managed to remove the lens cap.
“On July 28, 1981, in the evening, we pitched our tent on the banks of the Medveditsa River in the Kalinin Region. The weather was sweltering, calm, foreshadowing a thunderstorm. In the distance, over the horizon, clouds were pouring in, lightning flashed occasionally, but the sky above us was clear. It was getting dark. Suddenly, in the western part of the sky, at an angular height of approximately 45 °, we saw a white flickering glow. It occupied part of the sky about 30 ° wide. This lasted 3-5 minutes, then the glow disappeared. Just in case, I hid in the tent and after a few minutes from it I found out that everything was lit up around. Leaning out, I saw in the same place a dazzling ray emerging from the sky. Visually, it was perceived as a solid substance or a fluorescent lamp, placed vertically. The pillar of light reached the mist that rose above the water and was dispersed in these vapors. In the picture I took, a bright flare on the water is clearly visible.
The beam was observed for about one and a half minutes, after which it took a horizontal position and disappeared with great speed in the north direction, the light phenomena had just begun, we heard a strange squeak at the audibility limit (about 14-15 kilohertz). It lasted throughout the entire observation and stopped a few seconds after the disappearance of the light column. After the end of the apparition, all objects we touched were highly electrified. A few seconds later, where there was a glare from the light column on the water, a faint glow appeared.
One of the leading specialists in the field of atmospheric electricity, Professor I. M. Imyanitov, believed that a light column is a very rare stage of an intermediate state between linear and ball lightning, a kind of long-lived glow discharge. An additional condition for its existence should be strong ionization of air, for example, between a charged cloud and a water surface. A cloud moves at a much higher speed than a sailing or even a modern ship, and a pole of light moving with it will always catch up and overtake it.
Under the ground, strong electric fields and even real underground thunderstorms (according to the hypothesis of the Tomsk professor A. A. Vorobyov) can also lead to local ionization and the appearance of a glow discharge.