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This has been a very weird year, especially for weather.
Scientists at the University of Alaska flying in high altitude aircraft made a sensational discovery. Eugene Wescott and Davis Sentman recorded colossal flashes of red light bursting up to 80 miles high over the tops of thunderstorms.
"They look like carrots or tall jellyfish," said Wescott. "They appear brightest where they top out, so you have the jellyfish body at the top with tentacles trailing down."
But that wasn't all. They also recorded jets of blue light puffing out of the cloud-tops, though what these and the red "jellyfish" actually are remains a mystery.
All Wescott can suggest is that the intense electrical activity that occurs over the tops of thunderstorms combines with the upper atmosphere to light up like a sort of gigantic neon tube.
In Britain, during intense thunderstorms this summer, ball lightning bounced and floated through a house in Oxford, and a bright shaft of light beamed down into the stairway of a house in Bedford. Another ball of light the size of a football dropped on the village of Pulham Market in Norfolk during a thunderstorm, hit a telegraph pole, burst into a fireworks display of sparks and exploded inside two nearby houses.
Experts are at a loss to explain what happened, but...