The strange lights in the sky are usually attributed to UFOs, aliens, or secret government tests. However, recent observations across Europe show that these lights are of a much more natural, but equally mysterious nature.
Residents of southern England and northern France watched a stunning light show last month when glowing red lights called sprites, electrical charges that appear during violent thunderstorms, lit up across the English Channel.
Since the "lifespan" of a sprite is only about 100 milliseconds, it is very difficult to catch such a phenomenon with the camera.
Therefore, when on June 15, 2017, French photographer Stephanie Vetter posted on Facebook his photos of groups of glowing red sprites taken from Mount Oneque, one of the highest peaks in the Vosges mountain system in Lorraine, they instantly flew across the World Wide Web.
Due to their rather elusive nature, sprites have not yet been studied by meteorologists. Unlike traditional lightning bolts, sprites appear in the Earth's stratosphere and are discharges of cold, not hot, plasma.
They are often mistaken for UFOs, and some flying saucers fanatics even argue that sprites are a convenient cover, akin to the glowing "swamp gas" that is often used to explain classic UFO sightings.
Now that smartphones with cameras are in almost every pocket and this rarest phenomenon can be easily recorded on video, a lot of all kinds of guesses appear on this score.
This raises the question of how the civilizations of the future will look back at us. People tend to scoff at the beliefs of previous eras, which at that time were very advanced and then refuted. Who knows what future discoveries could be made in the field of red sprites or other such mysterious phenomena?
Promotional video:
Voronina Svetlana