Reports of a strange flash in the skies over Perm began to appear on the night of Saturday to Sunday, December 18. Eyewitnesses put forward various hypotheses on social networks - from a banal short circuit to the manifestation of the activity of heavenly bodies. Soon, video recordings of the phenomenon began to appear on the Web, which further intensified the activity of virtual commentators.
Flash from different videos
A bright glow for several seconds was visible in many districts of the regional center - on Milchakova, Yelkin, Kuibyshev streets, near the Semya hypermarket, in Sadovy and Yubileiny microdistricts, on Lipovaya Gora, behind the Almaz shopping center. Also, witnesses saw an outbreak on the streets of Polina Osipenko, Stakhanovskaya, Blukhera, Heroes Khasan, Dekabristov, in the microdistricts of Krokhalevsky and Rabochy settlement.
Some eyewitnesses claim that electricity went out for a few seconds in their houses and on the street. Recorded from a camera located on st. Lenin, it is clear that the lights have gone out throughout the quarter. Lanterns, signs and windows of houses immediately after the flash stopped burning for a moment.
The Emergencies Ministry knows nothing about the outbreak:
“After it became known about this phenomenon, we checked all the services - there were no reports of an emergency,” Oksana Butina, press secretary of the regional department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, told the Perm portal 59.ru.
Promotional video:
Local residents are actively commenting on what happened
“I saw a flash yesterday. Outside the window for a moment everything lit up and disappeared. To be honest, I thought that fireworks were being launched under the windows again, although I had never seen the glow of the fireworks so bright across the entire window,”writes a resident of Perm Yana Plyusnina.
“At twelve o'clock, being on the right bank of the Kama, I saw two flashes over the city,” an eyewitness says.
On social networks and forums, Permians share their theories about UFOs, missiles, short circuits, fireworks, natural phenomena and anomalies. There is no exact explanation for the night outbreak yet, the operational services do not report any emergency in this regard.
Someone suggested that we witnessed how comet Lovejoy flew close to our planet, since these days it came to the orbit of the Earth at 47 million kilometers and 73.8 million kilometers to the planet itself. Someone remembered that Interfax reported that the comet had already reached the fourth magnitude, and its dimensions are approximately equal to 2/3 the size of the galaxy M31 in the constellation Andromeda.
Moreover, it turned out that it will be possible to observe C / 2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) until March, and in the next two days it will move next to the Pleiades star cluster, then head towards the constellation Aries. On January 30, it can be seen in the constellation of the Triangle, when the comet will pass perihelion - the closest possible distance from the sun - and during February it will move towards the constellation Cassiopeia.
Mysterious flashes in the sky over Perm were arranged by the builders of Griboyedovsky?
However, Perm scientists seem to be ready to answer the question of what caused a series of bright flares over the city on the night from Saturday to Sunday. They believe that the reason for this phenomenon is technogenic.
So Nikolai Kalinin, head of the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Protection, Perm State National Research University, suggested:
- It seems to me that the reason for this phenomenon is still technogenic. Judging by the video that I was able to watch, most likely, the light source was located in the Griboyedovsky microdistrict. I passed and saw that there was a construction. The Permians could see the flashes from the welding, and the atmosphere helped make them so bright. The fact is that weather conditions now contribute to the fact that refractions of light sources in hexagonal ice crystals are possible in the atmosphere. Specifically, refraction can give such flashes. The light source was clearly short-lived. If it were a constant source, for example, the Moon, then we would observe the column all the time.
In the Perm planetarium, they refused to talk about flares in the night sky - the experts themselves did not observe the flashes, but assumed with a 90% probability that they had nothing to do with celestial bodies.
Based on media materials