Fall Asleep to Phenomena Caught on Camera That Science Couldn't Explain

For centuries, credible observers reported seeing a glowing sphere drift through a room during a thunderstorm. Scientists said it was a retinal afterimage. In 2012, a spectrometer in China accidentally recorded one — a luminous ball made of burning silicon nanoparticles vaporized from the soil by a lightning strike. For decades, airline pilots reported enormous red flashes above thunderstorms, fifty kilometers higher than lightning should reach. The reports were filed and ignored. In 1989, a camera on the Space Shuttle captured the first confirmed image of what scientists would call a sprite — and an entire family of upper-atmosphere electrical phenomena, occurring above every major thunderstorm on Earth, was documented for the first time. In Death Valley, rocks weighing hundreds of kilograms sat at the ends of long trails scored into a dry lakebed, and for sixty years no one saw them move. In 2013, GPS trackers and a patient research team finally witnessed it: thin panels of winter ice, pushed by gentle wind across wet mud, nudging the stones in silence.

Tonight we sit with six phenomena that credible people reported, institutions dismissed, and cameras eventually confirmed. Ball lightning, observed for centuries and recorded once. Sprites, elves, and blue jets, reported by pilots for decades and photographed from space. The Hessdalen lights, pulsing in a Norwegian valley since the 1930s, monitored continuously since 1998, still unexplained. The sailing stones, solved by patience and a GPS tracker after sixty years. Earthquake lights, captured on security cameras minutes before the ground moved. And STEVE — a narrow ribbon of hot gas flowing through the upper atmosphere at six kilometers per second, identified in 2016 because amateur photographers in Alberta noticed it and asked a university what it was.

The cameras are still running. The spectrometers are still recording. The monitoring stations are still watching their valleys and their fault lines and their skies. Whatever is happening in the upper atmosphere tonight, on the desert floor tonight, along the tectonic boundaries tonight — it is being measured. The world contains more phenomena than anyone has had time to point a camera at, and every year the picture gets a little larger. Let it get larger without you tonight. The instruments are patient. Rest.