In the summer of 1960, residents of a small town in east Texas had the misfortune of experiencing an incredible weather event. This is a non-municipal territory called Copperl in the Brazos valley, where no more than two hundred people lived at that time.
This meteorological anomaly still occupies the minds of many scientists on the planet, and eyewitnesses recall with a shudder the amazing night when, as it seemed, the gates to the underworld itself were opened. This happened on the fifteenth of June, after midnight. The summer night was habitually warm, but not hot, and there were no clouds in the sky. Only on the horizon did lightning flash periodically, which is common in Texas. The thermometer read twenty-one degrees Celsius. Americans, tired of the day, slept in their soft beds for a long time. In short, nothing foreshadowed trouble. And then everything changed overnight.
Terrifying storm
Copperl was suddenly hit by a terrible wind that seemed to come from nowhere. Its speed was over thirty-three meters per second. The hurricane ripped off rooftops, uprooted trees, and lifted livestock, including cows and horses, into the air. However, rapidly moving air currents were not the only problem for the townspeople. The air temperature began to rise rapidly, and very soon it became hot as hell here.
At first, the temperature jumped to thirty-eight degrees Celsius. Nevertheless, this was far from the limit. Less than half an hour later, the temperature rose to fifty-five. All the transformers in the city overheated and went out of order. When the electricity went out, air conditioners stopped working in the houses. It was impossible to breathe in the unbearably hot air, it literally burned the respiratory tract. People who had not been awakened by the hurricane before woke up and, finding themselves in such a hell, thought that their houses were on fire or that a bomb had exploded somewhere nearby. Frightened to death, adults dipped sheets in water and wrapped their children in them in order to somehow alleviate the suffering of their offspring.
The air temperature continued to rise and at some point reached sixty degrees Celsius! If before that the inhabitants of Copperl were in a state of tremendous panic, now a real insanity has begun in the city. People, gasping for breath, ran out of their houses, threw themselves on the ground and rolled on it with terrible screams, begging the higher powers to stop these torments. One elderly couple even chose to shoot themselves in order not to tolerate this mockery from nature. Many simply prayed, believing that the end of the world had come …
Promotional video:
Then the temperature finally began to drop and returned to normal in the morning. The Americans came to their senses and began to assess the damage caused by the bad weather. Looking at their fields, the farmers grabbed their hearts: all the agricultural plants were burned out. Only yesterday the corn, green everywhere, turned into straw drooping to the ground with black heads of cabbage inside. The cotton fruit was charred, like someone walking through the cotton fields with a flamethrower. Both in the city and in its vicinity, all the leaves on the bushes and trees turned into ash, scattering at the slightest breath of wind.
In the history of the United States, this incident went down as the Hell's Storm or the Storm of Satan. In Copperl's folklore, there are many legends about the fantastic weather phenomenon. Demons, jinn, angry Indian deities and other supernatural characters were blamed for the calamity.
Possible causes of Hellstorm
Some religious people, having learned about this weather phenomenon, began to draw parallels with Sodom and Gomorrah - ancient cities that, according to the Bible, God destroyed for the sins of their inhabitants. However, such devout people could not explain why the Creator angered the small farming town, which is no different from thousands of other American settlements. If we are to punish for sins, then the whole country, and not a tiny dot on its map.
And nobody died here then, except pensioners who shot themselves. If the unfortunate old people knew that the abnormal heat would soon subside, then they would hardly begin to lay hands on themselves.
Obviously, there was talk about aliens. Many Americans were convinced that representatives of an extraterrestrial civilization, whose flying saucer allegedly hovered over Copperl, were to blame.
They also talked about the climatic weapons of the Soviet Union. Of course, at the height of the Cold War, the Americans could not help but blame the "red aggressor" for their troubles. Now the States themselves are planning to create such weapons of mass destruction, but so far to no avail.
As for the scientists, they then failed to find a rational explanation for what happened. It is only recently that science has voiced the possible cause of Satan's Storm. According to experts, the events of that terrible night can be explained by such a phenomenon as a thermal explosion. This term has appeared in scientific circles relatively recently. The phenomenon has not yet been sufficiently studied, but its researchers have reason to believe that fifty-six years ago, exactly such a cataclysm was observed in Copperl.
A thermal explosion refers to sudden bursts of temperature that usually occur in the dark and are often accompanied by a thunderstorm. This probably happens when air currents rise from the ground and come into contact with a thunderstorm atmosphere. The latter throws this dense air column down, due to which the compressed air heats up instantly and tries to rise again upward in order to be thrown down again and again. This generates strong hurricane winds and the air reaches record high temperatures.
Several similar cases have occurred in the last century. For example, in June 1909 in the US state of Oklahoma, a similar thermal explosion occurred, as a result of which the air temperature rose to fifty-eight degrees. And in July 1967, in the city of Abadan in the south-west of Iran, the temperature in one night jumped to an impossible, at first glance, eighty-eight degrees Celsius! The disaster did not last long and, fortunately, did not harm anyone's health.