© NHK via AGUA sprite appears above a storm cloud in a still from the new video.
First seen by scientists in 1989, sprites and their menagerie of exotically named kin are bursts of electrical energy that form about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth, sometimes leaping all the way from the tops of thunderheads to outer space.
Lightning sprites are huge but quick - they appear and are gone in only ten milliseconds, said Hans Stenbaek-Nielsen, a space physicist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
The phenomena are also extremely bright.
"They're brighter than the planet Venus," as seen from Earth, Stenbaek-Nielsen said this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
In fact, he added, sprites are so bright that it's amazing nobody saw them until 20 years ago, although, he noted, high-flying pilots had apparently spotted sprites before then but kept mum.
"No pilot was willing to admit they had seen anything up there, because it would cast doubt on their mental state," he said.
Last summer Stenbaek-Nielsen joined a team of thunderstorm chasers funded by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. Carrying high-speed video cameras on a pair of Gulfstream jets, the scientists flew across the Midwest, hunting out sprite-generating thunderstorms.
© Hans Nielsen and USAF/AGUA sprite seen from an aircraft.
Sprites Simply "Pretty to Look At"?
Even though sprites have been studied for two decades, scientists still don't understand what causes them, said team member Yukihiro Takahashi, a space physicist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
What is known, he and Stenbaek-Nielsen said, is that vast amounts of energy are involved, and the release is apparently triggered by strong electrical fields above a thunderstorm.
Furthermore, Stenbaek-Nielsen said, the discharges may create electrical conduits between the thunderstorm and the ionosphere, a tenuous layer of the outer atmosphere extending 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) into space.
"Traditionally, the weather here on the ground has been thought to be separated from the 'weather' that goes on in space," said Geoff McHarg, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado who was also part of the study team.
"We had this big range in the middle [of Earth's atmosphere] called the mesosphere. When I was in graduate school, we called it the ignore-o-sphere. It was thought not much goes on there."
Not so today, he said: "This is where sprites go on."
For now, nobody knows how important sprites might be to Earth's atmospheric system or how they might interact with the space environment.
For all we know at the moment, Stenbaek-Nielsen said, lightning sprites might simply be like rainbows - "pretty to look at, but of no further significance."
These apparently confused scientists would do well to study the works of James McCanney and others describing the nature of the electric universe. Then all would be clear. The universe is a huge electrical capacitor.
"For now, nobody knows how important sprites might be to Earth's atmospheric system or how they might interact with the space environment."
Such ignorance and /or suppression of knowledge is part of the PTB's agenda to keep their hold on the backs of the inhabitants of this planet and we need to shrug them off. There is a source of free energy in our solar system that powers everthing we know. With the right techology, mankind could tap into that electrical system and stop polluting the planet with 'fossil fuel' emissions and spills.