If you happened to look up in the sky at the right time and in the right location Tuesday afternoon, you might have been lucky enough to see a rare, colorful cloud phenomenon known as a "fire rainbow."

Trisha Garlatti, of Edison, was one of those lucky ones. As she was driving through South River at about 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, she caught a glimpse of it and felt compelled to whip out her camera phone. "It was like a rainbow inside a cloud," she said.

Although it's commonly referred to as a fire rainbow, in the scientific world it's known as a circumhorizontal arc. And weather experts call it "cloud iridescence," said Sarah Johnson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service's regional office in Mount Holly.

Johnson said the conditions have to be right for this phenomenon to form, and on Tuesday those conditions were in play over parts of New Jersey: Thin clouds very high in the atmosphere, tiny ice crystals in the clouds, and sunlight hitting the ice crystals at a certain angle.

"It's basically the same principle behind what we normally see in rainbows," Johnson said. "But instead of dealing with rain droplets with regular rainbows, we're dealing with ice crystals, because these clouds are so high" and the temperatures are very cold up there.

If the clouds are shaped like an arc and the sunlight hits the ice crystals that are in those clouds, "they will refract the sunlight, creating the full spectrum of colored light instead of just white light," the meteorologist said.

Fire rainbows tend to form when thin, wispy cirrus clouds are high in the sky, as they were on Tuesday, about 15,000 feet above the ground, Johnson said. But they also could develop with even thinner clouds, such as cirrostratus clouds.

I was outside, enjoying a nice dinner and drink on a Montreal rooftop Tuesday evening when I saw it - a large fiery ball that blazed across the night sky. Then, as fast as it had appeared it was gone.

The entire incident, which occurred at around 9:30 p.m. ET, lasted all of five seconds, but the fear and paranoia set in for the rest of the night.

The end is near.

Social media

I took to the web to understand what had just happened. I was not prepared to rule out the possibility of alien invasion quite yet and neither were some in the Twitterverse.

Several people turned to Twitter to ask what the ball was.

"I thought, am I losing my mind?"

That was the reaction of Oisin Lavelle as he spent two hours watching a mysterious, brightly coloured sphere moving in the sky south-west of Christchurch on Monday night.

Lavelle took footage of the object before it moved away at high speed. On Tuesday night it reappeared and he drove nearer for a better look, and saw three such objects. He said he found the whole experience haunting and would like to know what he saw.

"I'm quite an open-minded person, but I'm not a UFO buff or a conspiracy theorist or anything.

"I couldn't come up with a logical explanation for it. My gut feeling is, this was not some sort of technology we have on earth," he said.

Lavelle, the managing director of a building firm, was letting out his dog Rollo when he first saw the bright lights in the night sky from the deck of his lower Cashmere home. It was just after 10.30pm on Monday.

"I grabbed my camera and tried to get the thing steady and in focus. I just didn't know what to think, it was just so peculiar," he said.

"I just kept watching and filming because I wanted to see what it would do".

Lavelle described the object as a brightly lit perfect sphere. The lights kept changing through a wide range of colours at first, but the colour spectrum narrowed.

For the first time, astronomers have captured visual evidence of the existence of tubular plasma structures living in the inner layers of the magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth.

"For over 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we've provided visual evidence that they are really there," explained Cleo Loi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) and the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

"The discovery of the structures is important because they cause unwanted signal distortions that could, as one example, affect our civilian and military satellite-based navigation systems. So we need to understand them," Loi, who is the lead author on this research, continued.

The plasma in the magnetosphere, which is the region of space around the Earth occupied by its magnetic field, is created by the atmosphere being ionised by sunlight. The ionosphere is the innermost layer of the magnetosphere, and higher up is the plasmasphere. These are implanted with many oddly shaped plasma structures, including the tubes.

NASA's Cassini space probe has recently sent back some very interesting images that reveal something strange going on with Saturn's wispy, thin F ring. The photos reportedly show a noticeably visible disturbance in the planetary ring.

The F ring, incidentally, was shaped by the two shepherd moons of Saturn, namely Pandora and Prometheus. Furthermore, the two comparatively tiny moons are still hard at work sculpting the rings, making it an ongoing process. The ring is comprised of gores, strands, jets and kinks.

Scientists from NASA have speculated that the disruption noticed on Saturn's ring is not the work of Pandora, which is located quite close by. The researchers have suggested that the strange disturbance could possibly be caused by the interaction of a minuscule object embedded in the F ring itself, with the ring's core material.

Planetary scientists sometimes call such features jets. Additionally, the tiny size of the embedded object makes their detection difficult, especially at the resolution of images captured by Cassini. However, scientists suggest their presence by observing the subsequent disruptive effects, caused by the tiny objects.

The Solar System may hold 10 or 11 planets, scientists have predicted after running new computer models on the data which led to the announcement of Planet Nine.

In January, astronomers Professor Konstantin Batygin and Professor Mike Brown from California Institute of Technology predicted the existence of a ninth planet after discovering that 13 objects in the Kuiper Belt - an area beyond Neptune - were all moving together as if 'lassooed' by the gravity of a huge object.

Now scientists from Cambridge University and Spain have discovered that the paths of the dwarf planets are not as stable as they thought, meaning they could be falling under the influence of more planets further out.

Sverre Aarseth from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, two freelance Spanish astronomers, said that the orbit of Planet Nine would have to change to allow the dwarf planet to maintain stability for a long time.

Otherwise more planets would need to be involved.

"We believe that in addition to a Planet Nine, there could also be a Planet Ten and even more," said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos.

On February 13th, 2001, a strange airplane crash was observed in the Southwest corner of Northern Ireland, less than a mile away from the border with the Republic of Ireland. There was no airplane, but despite credible witnesses of what may have been an impact event, the story was quickly squashed as a genuine mistake, and then as a hoax. The manner in which this story was squashed with slashing diminutives begs the question: If this is indeed a cover-up, then why?

BBC News, February 13, 2001
Aircraft crashes on mountain

Police in Northern Ireland are investigating reports that a light aircraft has crashed in County Fermanagh.

It is understood that a plane came down at Benaughlin Mountain near Kinawley shortly after 1800 GMT.

It is believed helicopters are being used in the rescue effort.

One day later the same site had the following report:

Tuesday, 13 February, 2001, 20:56 GMT, BBC News
Mystery surrounds 'plane crash' reports

Mystery surrounds the source of flames and smoke in the sky over County Fermanagh which has sparked a major search operation.

© Unknown

About 12 people described seeing flames and smoke on the side of the Benaughlin Mountain, near Kinawley, on Tuesday night.

Paul McCaffrey, who raised the alarm with a friend, is convinced he saw something in the sky with smoke billowing from it.

"I saw a dot at the front and a black trail of smoke leading down at an angle towards the mountain," he said.

A British Army helicopter using heat sensitive equipment also flew over the area.

But following more than three hours of extensive searches, nothing was found.

On June 8th, high above a thunderstorm in Colorado, an enormous ring of light appeared near the edge of space. Amateur astronomer Thomas Ashcraft photographed the phenomenon using a low-light video camera.
"It only lasted about a millisecond," says Ashcraft, "but it was definitely there. The ring was about 300 km wide," he estimates.

This is an example of an ELVE (Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources). First seen by cameras on the space shuttle in 1990, ELVEs appear when a pulse of electromagnetic radiation from lightning propagates up toward space and hits the base of Earth's ionosphere. A faint ring of light marks the broad 'spot' where the EMP hits.

Starting today, it appears the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. We say "appears" because officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy's largest installation in the Mojave Desert. And the Navy won't tell us much about what's going on.

The FAA issued an advisory warning pilots on Saturday that global positioning systems (GPS) could be unreliable during six different days this month, primarily in the Southwestern United States. On June 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, and 30th the GPS interference testing will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time. But if you're on the ground, you probably won't notice interference.

The testing will be centered on China Lake, California—home to the Navy's 1.1 million acre Naval Air Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. The potentially lost signals will stretch hundreds of miles in each direction and will affect various types of GPS, reaching the furthest at higher altitudes. But the jamming will only affect aircraft above 50 feet. As you can see from the FAA map below, the jamming will almost reach the California-Oregon border at 40,000 feet above sea level and 505 nautical miles at its greatest range.

The source of a loud echoing bang has the Palmerston North police and fire service baffled. A "deep resounding bang" was heard at about 10pm on Thursday, near Kelvin Grove. A police spokesperson said police attended the callout but they were not able to locate its source.

"It was a definitely a loud deep bang - nothing like a gun shot bang, which is quick and high pitch.

Palmerston North Astronomical Society member Noel Munford said the noise could have been a sonic boom created from a fire ball.

But he said if it was a fire ball, then there would have been reports of people seeing a "bright light", burning space junk, shooting across the sky. Gail Lucinsky said she heard the explosive sound from the bottom of Pahiatua Track.

"It was so loud that I jumped out of my skin thinking that one of my parents had fallen heavily and hit the wall in the room behind me."

She said she went outside to look for a source but could not find anything.

"A transformer exploding was suggested as a likely cause, but we couldn't see any part of Palmy in darkness, so it remained a mystery," she said.

Sofia Butler said she heard the explosion sound "very loud and clear" from Lombard St.

"I also heard lots of teens roaming around the streets which at the time I thought may be responsible for that big bang. I haven't heard anything like it to be fair."