Red Sprites: The Lightning Above the Storm That Pilots Weren't Believed About

For most of the twentieth century, if you were a pilot and you told anyone you had seen a burst of red light shoot upward from the top of a thunderstorm toward the stars, you learned to keep it to yourself. It went in no logbook. It sounded like fatigue, or a trick of the eye, or something you did not want written next to your name. The pilots were right, and it took an accident to prove it.

The vindication came on July 6, 1989. Scientists at the University of Minnesota, led by John R. Winckler, were testing a low-light television camera pointed at the sky when they caught two columns of light towering above a distant storm. They had recorded, by luck, the first clear image of what would come to be called a sprite. The reports pilots had filed for decades were suddenly, undeniably, real.

What a sprite actually is

Sprites are a form of electrical discharge, but they happen in the wrong place. Ordinary lightning connects a cloud to the ground or to another cloud, down in the dense lower atmosphere. Sprites erupt above the storm, in the thin air of the mesosphere, reaching from around 50 to 90 kilometers up, near the edge of space. They are triggered most often by unusually powerful positive lightning strikes below, which momentarily unbalance the charge in the upper atmosphere and let it discharge in a vast, faint bloom.

They are red because of the air itself. At those altitudes the discharge excites nitrogen molecules, which glow red, giving sprites their characteristic crimson color with bluish tendrils hanging beneath. They are enormous, spanning tens of kilometers, yet they last only milliseconds, which is exactly why they are so hard to catch and why the naked eye registers only a fleeting flush. A jellyfish shape, a carrot shape, a cluster of columns: observers describe them in the language of things briefly glimpsed.

A whole family of upper-atmosphere lights

Sprites turned out to be one member of a small zoo. There are blue jets, which shoot upward in narrow cones from the tops of storms; there are elves, expanding rings of light even higher up; and there are related discharges with equally whimsical names. Together they are called transient luminous events, and their study only became a real field after 1989, once instruments and later the International Space Station and countless amateur cameras made them routine to record. What was once a dismissed anecdote is now photographed by hobbyists from mountaintops.

Where the tidy story frays

The physics is solid and getting better every year. The lesson that lingers is not about atmospheric chemistry but about testimony. For decades, credible professional observers reported a real phenomenon and were quietly disbelieved because it did not fit the textbook, and only a camera pointed by chance changed that. It is a clean, documented case of eyewitnesses being right about something the experts had ruled out, which is worth remembering the next time a sober witness describes a light in the sky that does not belong there.

Below, readers have submitted their own sightings of strange lights above and around storms, voting each True, Fake, or Not sure. Bring the science and your suspicion both, and file your verdict.