There are unusual lightning - "sprites"

Simple lightning familiar to us - a level that slip between the clouds in the troposphere and the surface of the earth. Sprites do occur in the upper layers of the atmosphere high above the storm clouds, and thus take strange forms, not even remotely resembling electric shocks.





We open these discharges relatively recently, in 1989. Open them John Randolph Winkler, a retired professor, 73-year veteran of NASA, when sent to the storm clouds high-sensitivity camera, simply verifying it, and then looking at a record frame by frame, I found two bright flashes, which, unlike the lightning did not go down, to the ground and up to the ionosphere. The reason for their occurrence is called the formation of the electric field of high intensity storms over the area that looks like a flash of light a strange shape. Sprites usually occur in groups, often in the form of a ring. They are mobile, committed "dancing" of the movement, and they are very easily mistaken for UFOs. The vertical columns in the glow sprites reach 20 km in height, they can be a beam diameter of up to 70 km.





via factroom.ru