Diffuse green cord of light from the sky

[Thomas R Morrison]

This was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life, so I’ve been hoping to hear a similar story on a paranormal show like this, but so far, nothing. Perhaps it will ring a bell in the minds of one of the paranormal aficionados here.

One calm and cloudless evening in Burbank, California, around 9 or 10pm (at least an hour or two after sunset), I was hanging out in the corner of the lighted pool with my dear friend Diana beneath the stars. I think it was 1995. We were both standing in the pool, leaning against the perpendicular walls, chatting and relaxing.

Then I noticed something odd: directly in front of me, there was a narrow, diffuse lime-green light, which was faintly visible against the shadowy bushes surrounding the pool. It was maybe 4 or 5 feet in front of us, entering the pool at a right angle from above. At first I thought the light was playing a trick on my eyes, so I followed it up to see it against the dark but starry sky. And that’s when it really struck me: I could see this strange diffuse cord of greenish light, maybe about a foot in diameter overall and brightest in the center, reaching straight up into the sky as far as the eye could see. And as I watched, amazed and bewildered by this otherworldly cord of lime green light, I could see that it was very slowly gyrating in place over the enormous distance between the pool and the sky above.

Diana must’ve noticed by head craned back as I looked at this thing in stupefied silence, because I heard her say: “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

Not wanting to cloud her response with my own description, I said: “I don’t know; what are you seeing?”

And she described exactly the same thing: “Some kind of weird green column of light reaching up into the sky. You’re seeing it too?”

We watched it, looking up at it because it was so much easier to see against the night sky, and the slowly gyrating motion was only evident when we looked almost straight up to see the whole length of it. I was trying to see where the other side ended, but it was fairly faint so it basically disappeared a few hundred yards above us. There were no visible objects or clouds or anything up there, nothing that would explain this eerie cord of green light. But the whole time, one end of it remained directly in front of us, motionless, intersecting with the pool about 5 feet in front of both of us.

It must’ve lasted for at least a couple of minutes, because we talked about it and its odd very slowly twisting motion, while it almost imperceptibly faded in brightness until we couldn’t see it anymore.

Has anyone here ever heard of something like this? I realize that it’s tempting to assume that this was a reflection of the light from the pool focused into a beam somehow – but that’s impossible, this thing was at least hundreds of yards long, collimated at the same diameter all the way up, and weirdly corkscrewing in place, oblivious to our movement in the pool water.

This incident drives me crazy – at least with a ufo, you can come up with some kind of a explanation. This thing….I have no idea what to make of it. My inclination is to conclude that it was some weird naturally occurring phenomenon – but if that’s the case, other people should be talking about seeing something like this, and I have yet to hear a single other account like it.

Have any of you?

 

[William Strathmann]

Very interesting story!

I don't know what the answer is, but I thought of luminosities associated with rift environments, i.e. "earthquake lights," though there doesn't have to be an earthquake at the time of the light.

Prevalence of Earthquake Lights Associated with Rift Environments
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...lights-earthquake-prediction-geology-science/
National Geographic article

But, who knows, maybe not.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Very interesting story!

I don't know what the answer is, but I thought of luminosities associated with rift environments, i.e. "earthquake lights," though there doesn't have to be an earthquake at the time of the light.

Prevalence of Earthquake Lights Associated with Rift Environments
National Geographic article

But, who knows, maybe not.

That’s an excellent line of inquiry to pursue, thank you good Sir. I've always assumed that earthquake lights would emulate known electrical phenomena like discharges, and plasma balls akin to ball lightning, but now I see that a wider range of characteristics seem to be in play. I’ll enjoy reading through the case histories.

Assuming that this was a naturally occurring phenomenon, it’s unlike anything that academic science is aware of, which is interesting. The closest thing I can compare it to is the aurora borealis, because that’s persistent and often has the same lime-green color[1], but there’s no known mechanism for that effect to collimate and reach down to the surface of the Earth. Maybe there’s a way for tectonic activity to couple with the Earth’s magnetosphere and create a localized flux linkage, which could allow charges in the ionosphere to spiral down to the ground.

I think that people too often forget that although we’ve got a pretty good handle on the very common natural phenomena on the Earth, there are still all kinds of rare exotic phenomena that we have little to no understanding of yet. And who knows what the technological applications might be for such effects.

[1]

 

[stonehart]

Sounds very much like earthquake lights to me having actually seen the phenomena on more than one occasion, however I was seeing it as a glow and flashes of light in the sky.

Hard to explain this but sort of a cross between and Aurora an sheet lightning if that makes sense.

 

[Randall]

This was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life ... I noticed ... directly in front of me ... a narrow, diffuse lime-green light, which was faintly visible against the shadowy bushes surrounding the pool ... maybe 4 or 5 feet in front of us, entering the pool at a right angle from above ... I could see this strange diffuse cord of greenish light, maybe about a foot in diameter overall and brightest in the center, reaching straight up into the sky as far as the eye could see ...

• Was the beam a straight line or did it wind ( corkscrew ) or bend in any way?
• Did you go over to it to see if it was something shining up out of the pool rather than down into it?
• Did you try to touch it or put anything under or into it to see what would happen?
• Was this your own pool or somebody else's or one at a hotel?

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Was the beam a straight line or did it wind ( corkscrew ) or bend in any way?

That was one of the most mystifying things about it: it seemed to be a perfectly straight line going directly upward, until I craned my head all the way back to see how far up it went. At that point I could see that over the full length of it, it was very slowly twisting - not mechanically, but organically. It wasn't twisting dramatically - perhaps 2ft off center, with maybe 1 twist along the full length of hundreds of yards.

Did you go over to it to see if it was something shining up out of the pool rather than down into it?

The lights in the pool were on the sidewalls, and the pool was painted a light blue color, so I don't see any way that the pool could've produced a column of green light like that reaching so far up into the sky, and our moving around in the pool didn't seem to affect it at all. Besides, the air is very dry in Burbank, so there wouldn't be enough moisture or dust to reflect a light source. The cord of weird greenish light appeared to be self-illuminating from the center.

Did you try to touch it or put anything under or into it to see what would happen?

No, I wasn't that brave, haha. It seemed to be some kind of energy, because it was glowing. And whether that meant some kind of electrical energy or radioactive energy, it seemed like a bad idea to put my hand in it or get too close to it (especially being half-immersed in water). Now I kinda wish that I'd tried to see what it felt like, if anything. Or if I could've "broken the beam" with my hand. But I guess, instinctively, there's a reluctance to physically interact with something that defies explanation.

Was this your own pool or somebody else's or one at a hotel?

This was the common pool for Diana's small apartment complex. We had spent time in the pool on other occasions and never saw anything like it, and it was beguiling to her too. I've still never read another account resembling this, and I've been on the lookout. I'm hoping to run across something in the earthquakes lights reports, but so far those all have the characteristics of well-known electrical phenomena. I've yet to hear about any kind of electrical phenomenon that can cause a green glow in the atmosphere, other than the aurora borealis, and nothing resembling a single narrow cord of persistent light like this.

 

[Randall]

That was one of the most mystifying things about it: ...

Interesting. Thanks for the reply.

... This was the common pool for Diana's small apartment complex ...

How many stories was this complex? Did any balconies face out over the pool? If so how many stories up did it go ( approximately )?

 

[William Strathmann]

One calm and cloudless evening in Burbank, California, around 9 or 10pm (at least an hour or two after sunset), I was hanging out in the corner of the lighted pool with my dear friend Diana beneath the stars. I think it was 1995.

Maybe your friend D. knows the actual date of this event?

If you knew it, then you could at least check for other reports of unusual events on or near the same date.

There is an expert on tectonic stress and emissions, Friedemann Freund, who evidently works for, or worked for NASA. So, presumably, he might be open to giving you an opinion as to whether or not your report is consistent with luminosities associated with rift stress. That might help you sort things out.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

I heard back from the brilliant and gracious Dr. Friedemann Freund, and he offered a detailed and fascinating explanation for the eerie green column of light that we saw that night. It turns out that the good doctor has discovered that certain types of rock generate very powerful electrical currents when placed under stress (on the order of hundreds of millions of amperes) – enough electrical energy to ionize the atmosphere and produce a green glow. The ionized air molecules then rise from the induced thermal energy, which explains the vertical orientation of the diffuse cord of light that we saw.

Here’s his paper detailing the mechanism of this astonishing effect:

“Electric currents streaming out of stressed igneous rocks – A step towards understanding pre-earthquake low frequency EM emissions,” Freund et al, 2006
Dropbox - Electric currents streaming out of stressed igneous rocks. A step towards understanding pre.earthquake low frequency EM emissions.Freund.2006.pdf

He also kindly provided his 2014 paper for us, which gives an excellent overview of earthquake light phenomena:

“Prevalence of Earthquake Lights Associated with Rift Environments,” Freund, Thériault et al. 2014
Dropbox - Prevalence_of_Earthquake_Lights_Associated_with_Rift_Environments.Freund et al.pdf

And here’s the detailed explanation that he offered, which I share with his permission:

“My recent interest in pre-earthquake phenomena evolved out of a discovery, purely academic, that I had made in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while studying atomic-scale defects in oxide materials. I found evidence for a type of defects that everybody else had overlooked, in which two oxygen anions had each one electron less than would be expected. Chemists would call this a peroxy defect. Normally these two unusual oxygen anions are innocuous and hard to detect, actually practically impossible to detect. That changes when we do something nasty to them (or Nature does something nasty to them) which causes the peroxy defects to “wake up”. They then generate an electron and a hole, just like those crucial ingredients of semiconductors.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s, when it became clear to me that rocks contain plenty of peroxy defects. Tectonic stresses, which Nature applies to rocks deep in the Earth crust, 10-30 miles below the surface, cause the peroxy defects to “wake up”. The electrons have to stay where the stress is applied, but the holes (we now call them “positive holes”) have the remarkable ability to flow out, travel through the surrounding less stressed or unstressed rocks at speeds up to 220 miles per hour and over distances of ten, even hundreds of miles. I was able to show in laboratory experiments that, when I stress one end of a rock several meters long, I can pull out a positive hole current from the unstressed end. I was also able to show that, when the positive holes arrive at the surface, they can do a lot of mischief, including ionizing the air and forming massive amounts of ions. I have measured the rates of these ionization reactions and found that, in laboratory experiments, we can easily produce billions of airborne ions per square inch per second.

This is where your observation comes in. What you have witnessed was probably one of those massive air ionization events, which can happen at unexpected places, when tectonic forces deep below stress rocks and cause a massive outflow of positive hole charge carriers. Preferentially at topographic highs, a hill or a ridge. Such events may be linked to subsequent earthquake activity but not necessarily so.

The air ionization always begins with positive airborne ions being generated at the ground-air interface, mostly positively charged oxygen molecules, followed by positive and negative ions, that are generated when the electric fields are ground-air interface grow so steep that they trigger millions of tiny corona discharges. Sometimes you can smell it, because corona discharges produce ozone. In addition, the corona discharges produce electronically excited oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air. These excited gas molecules have long lifetimes, on the order of minutes. When they return to the ground state, they emit light – typically in the green part of the spectrum.

What was probably happening in your case is that you and your friend Diana were by chance standing close to a spot, where these air ionization processes occurred on very local scale. Now, when you inject ions into the air, they act as nuclei for the condensation of moisture. In your case, the relative humidity in Burbank must have been just right to form invisibly tiny water droplets. This process is strongly exothermal, releasing heat which warms the air. The warm air started to rise, forming a narrow updraft channel, wiggling and gyrating, that dragged along many of the electronically excited air molecules. As those molecules rose with the warm air, they de-excited, emitting the eerie green light that you and Diana witnessed.”

Many thanks to William Strathmann for providing the ideal scientist to approach with this question that has haunted me for over 20 years. I think I’m even more excited about the physical principle that Dr. Freund has discovered which explains this observation, than I am to finally have an explanation for it

I’d also like to mention that Dr. Freund is a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute – perhaps he’d make an interesting guest for the show.

 

[William Strathmann]

Thomas, you are more than welcome, and I too am highly gratified to see Dr. Freund's very plausable answer to such a "high-strange" appearing phenomenon.

 

[Constance]

Maybe there’s a way for tectonic activity to couple with the Earth’s magnetosphere and create a localized flux linkage, which could allow charges in the ionosphere to spiral down to the ground.

This is, for me, a very interesting idea (though I'm not at all equipped to understand the general physical subject matter you and others are exploring here). The thread as a whole is fascinating. Can you or anyone else here provide a link or links where I can learn more about these and other light and light-beam phenomena? Thanks.

 

[Waller]

I heard back from the brilliant and gracious Dr. Friedemann Freund, and he offered a detailed and fascinating explanation for the eerie green column of light that we saw that night. It turns out that the good doctor has discovered that certain types of rock generate very powerful electrical currents when placed under stress (on the order of hundreds of millions of amperes) – enough electrical energy to ionize the atmosphere and produce a green glow. The ionized air molecules then rise from the induced thermal energy, which explains the vertical orientation of the diffuse cord of light that we saw.

Could be.

Better question is why did you create this physical experience for yourself? What have you learned?

The rest is superfluous.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Thomas, you are more than welcome, and I too am highly gratified to see Dr. Freund's very plausable answer to such a "high-strange" appearing phenomenon.

It’s a rare privilege to receive such a fascinating and detailed explanatory proposal from an accomplished and pioneering scientist – that was a hell of a recommendation: thank you.

I’m already contemplating the design of a solar-powered ozone detector wired to a cellular transmitter, so I can talk to the owner about installing it above that pool the next time I’m in Los Angeles. Because if he’s right, and I suspect that he is, then it’s likely to happen again at that very same spot when the tectonic stresses are right. And the prospect of getting hard data to validate his model “in the field” is extremely tantalizing. Hell, I could even install a little digital video recorder to start filming whenever the ozone detector goes off, and possibly capture the effect optically.

This is, for me, a very interesting idea (though I'm not at all equipped to understand the general physical subject matter you and others are exploring here). The thread as a whole is fascinating. Can you or anyone else here provide a link or links where I can learn more about these and other light and light-beam phenomena? Thanks.

Frankly I’m stunned to finally have a sensible scientific explanation of that experience – I rarely even spoke about it, because without even an inkling of an explanation, I figured that nobody would believe me.

I provided two download links for Dr. Freund’s papers in my previous post: the first one describes the mechanism of electrical charge transport through solid rock (which is fascinating in and of itself), and the second link is to his comprehensive 2014 paper about earthquake lights – there’s lots of great stuff in there ;

Could be.

Better question is why did you create this physical experience for yourself? What have you learned?

The rest is superfluous.

Oh please. Why did I create the sunrise this morning, or the traffic jam on my way to work? The narcissism of that kind of thinking boggles my mind. Reality got along just fine before I was born, and will continue unimpeded after I’m dead and buried. We don’t create reality; we only get to decide how we respond to the experiences that it presents to us.

 

[Waller]

Oh please. Why did I create the sunrise this morning, or the traffic jam on my way to work? The narcissism of that kind of thinking boggles my mind.

You obviously do not see yourself as truly created in the "image of Source". That's OK part of our experience is to forget who we are and remember it again. Perhaps it is to enjoy your path as one who never remembers, another unique perspective. Has nothing to do with narcissism and everything to do with your connections to All That Is. Or lack thereof as I have explained.

For if you truly remembered who you are, you wouldn't for a moment doubt that you create your own physical reality, co-creating with others, often in scenarios your physical mind has NO ability to understand...for it can only perceive the physical dream you have created in conjunction with your Higher Mind.

Reality got along just fine before I was born, and will continue unimpeded after I’m dead and buried. We don’t create reality; we only get to decide how we respond to the experiences that it presents to us.

Then who creates physical reality so that we can have those very real experiences within our physical dream?

God? Source? And who do you think YOU are?

 

[DROBNJAK]

Great explanation, but it leaves me puzzled, because in the original description you said that beam entered the pool and the water in the pool: "It was maybe 4 or 5 feet in front of us, entering the pool at a right angle from above"

1) that beam could not had originated ìn the water of the pool, because water is conductive and currents coming from the earth would had spread out over the whole volume of the conductor, hère the water. So colimation into a beam would never happen.

2) Pool was encased into an insulator, either concrete or fiberglass or blue pool paint. So those geo currents had no way of penetrating multiple layers of insulator in order to enter the pool.

3) you would never ģet zapped if you had put your hand into the beam because ýou were already on the same potential as the water in the pool and the water was on the same potential as the beam.

4) If a telluric current of "several hundreds of milions ampères" entered the pool water would boil.

5) William Strathmann's explanation is certainly a good science, but it doesn'the apply to the particular circumstances of this case.

If I may suggest ETH hypotesis about beam's origin is still on.

 

[William Strathmann]

5) William Strathmann's explanation is certainly a good science, but it doesn'the apply to the particular circumstances of this case.

a) I have attempted to explain nothing.

b) A fault line runs through, and beside, Burbank, CA.

c) I suggested to Thomas that he contact an expert on rift stresses to see if that might possibly provide an explanation.

d) I presume that Thomas explained the circumstances to Dr. Freund, i.e. that the diffuse green column emanated from the swimming pool, so that he took that into consideration.

e) I do not know Dr. Freund, other than reading his papers. But it appears his work is solid and acceptable, to NASA at least.

f) My guess is that the diffuse green cord was not composed of a flow of "hundreds of millions of amps." since a lightning bolt evidently only generates between 10,000 to 100,000 amps. and the diffuse cord did not act like a lightning bolt. Instead, if I understand Dr. Freund, an extremely high positive charge was built up somewhere below the earth's surface by the rift stress, and that is where there was "hundreds of millions of amps" of current. That place below the surface with very highly positive charged stressed rock consequently caused an electric field differential with the natural electrical charge in the atmosphere (I presume), and the diffuse green cord was evidently the location of a very strong electric field line, with ionized molecules following that electric field. That is my non-expert guess at understanding Dr. Freund's explanation. I was a radar technician in the military and so have some basic understanding of electrical fields, but, I make no claim to rightly explain Dr. Freund's theory, or Thomas's diffuse green cord.

h) Personally, whatever the ultimate explanation for the diffuse green cord would be interesting.

 

[DROBNJAK]

The gist of what I am saying is that out of all the places, this green cord can't form above swimming pool, because the pool's structure is an insulator. Earth and soil are conductive, so natural place for this cord to rise from is bare soil on the outside of the pool. Practically speaking, its impossible to have this cord forming above the insulator when there is conductor everywhere around it.

These currents are very well known phenomena and they are called telluric currents. They had been measured in a vicinity of San Andreas Fault which is maybe 100 miles to the north-west from Burbank.

Another strange thing is uniqueness of this phenomena. Telluric currents are very active in a whole of California, because its an seismically active region. These cords of green light should be occurring proportionally to the seismic activity in the region, maybe at least 2-3 times per year. As well, according to the observation these cord had risen several hundreds of yards up, so they should be visible by many people from 50 to 100 miles around. So its extremely strange that this observation is so unique and that other Californians are not reporting them more frequently.

Another observation that is hard to explain is the uniformity of this cord. Because cord is thermally induced, so ascending of the hot air into colder air above, would have a strong tendency to diffuse cord's diameter with a distance from the source. As well the cord would wiggle lot more because of the winds present in the atmosphere, which would further aid to dispersion.

And one more, Burbank's latitude is about 34º, which means that flux lines of Earth's magnetic field are very close to being parallel to the ground. So it would require an enormous, unnaturally focused magnetic field to bend the magnetic flux lines nearly 90º and make them vertical.

But its unlikely it was UFO either, because if it was UFO beam, than it would be perfectly straight and it wouldn't be gyrating, but more look like rotating tube.

There must be some permanent anomaly bellow that spot in the pool. Modern smarphones have accelerometers, which are actually gravitometers and can measure a strength of the gravitational field. It would be interesting to take a good smartphone to that spot, during some seismic activity and measure if there is any disturbance in gravitational and magnetic field.

I hope you have a waterproof smartphone ;-)

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Great explanation, but it leaves me puzzled, because in the original description you said that beam entered the pool and the water in the pool: "It was maybe 4 or 5 feet in front of us, entering the pool at a right angle from above"

1) that beam could not had originated ìn the water of the pool, because water is conductive and currents coming from the earth would had spread out over the whole volume of the conductor, hère the water. So colimation into a beam would never happen.

2) Pool was encased into an insulator, either concrete or fiberglass or blue pool paint. So those geo currents had no way of penetrating multiple layers of insulator in order to enter the pool.

3) you would never ģet zapped if you had put your hand into the beam because ýou were already on the same potential as the water in the pool and the water was on the same potential as the beam.

4) If a telluric current of "several hundreds of milions ampères" entered the pool water would boil.

5) William Strathmann's explanation is certainly a good science, but it doesn'the apply to the particular circumstances of this case.

If I may suggest ETH hypotesis about beam's origin is still on.

This looked like a natural, organic phenomenon to me, not a technological one: the way the diffuse luminous cord slowly gyrated in place was distinct from a laser beam, for example. And it was fairly dim – I seriously doubt that anyone would’ve noticed it from any distance, against the light pollution of the city. If we hadn’t been close to it, and positioned to see it against the dark sky overhead, we wouldn’t have even noticed it.

I had the same kinds of questions about the specific interface dynamics regarding the concrete pool floor and the dispersion through the water, but he didn’t respond to them.

His basic mechanism makes a lot more sense than anything else though, so I consider the issue to be essentially solved. This electrical tectonic current may *technically* fall under the term “telluric current,” but this is a *totally different mechanism* than the currents that people usually mean when they use that term, so calling it a telluric current only confuses the issue. In the second paper above he refers to this phenomenon as “tectonic stress lights,” and therein they discusses similar cases – one in particular near Lima, Peru, is depicted that shows a vastly larger effect than the little cord of light that we saw that night, but is otherwise very similar in appearance.

The current can be *as high* as 100’s of millions of amps, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always that intense. And the power also depends on the voltage, which we don’t know (he doesn’t mention voltage in either of those papers), so you can’t assume that it would be powerful enough to boil the water in the pool (Power = Amps x Volts).

Pure water is actually an awful conductor. The conductivity only increases with ionic compounds mixed into it, like salt. But this wasn’t a saltwater pool, so the water probably would’ve had poor conductivity.

My working model goes like this: either the electric field beneath the pool was strong enough to pass through a wet hairline crack at the bottom of the pool, or there was a metal drain pipe at the bottom of the pool (I don’t recall seeing one, but I think that all in-ground pools have a drain at the bottom). The electric field ionized the water at that spot, and those ions rose to the surface, ionizing the air as well at that interface. These excited particles rose and collimated for the same reason that fires produce a column of smoke. It was a calm night, so it’s not surprising that the ionized air rose straight up like that, with the very subtle twisting motion that we observed.

In this model, the key element is a locus of mafic rock directly beneath that swimming pool; gravitational and magnetic anomalies aren’t required. Although transient magnetic anomalies have been reported in tectonically active areas, probably induced by these powerful electrical currents that can appear when certain types of rock are under stress.

 

[Constance]

in the original description you said that beam entered the pool and the water in the pool: "It was maybe 4 or 5 feet in front of us, entering the pool at a right angle from above"

@Thomas R Morrison, I'm having trouble creating a mental image of this beam as seen from your perspective inside the pool based on the italicized phrase quoted above. I must have missed that detail earlier in the thread, and have been picturing the beam as entirely vertical (whether entering the pool from the ground beneath the pool or from the air above the pool). Could you provide a line drawing or sketch to show what you mean by the 'right angle' in the beam that you observed at some distance above the pool? Thank you.

ps, it seems to me that if the beam itself was bent, it might well have been produced by a 'ufo'.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

@Thomas R Morrison, I'm having trouble creating a mental image of this beam as seen from your perspective inside the pool based on the italicized phrase quoted above. I must have missed that detail earlier in the thread, and have been picturing the beam as entirely vertical (whether entering the pool from the ground beneath the pool or from the air above the pool). Could you provide a line drawing or sketch to show what you mean by the 'right angle' in the beam that you observed at some distance above the pool? Thank you.

Sorry for the confusion Constance - the cord was perfectly vertical, like a pillar, except for the slight curves as it twisted around a little bit (within a foot or two of a vertical line) at some height above us, probably from a gentle air movement higher up. I just meant that it was at a right angle to the pool water.