Earthquake Induced UFOs

I came across this article out of China and it was intriguing. Obviously it doesn’t explain all UFOs, but it does explain some of the strange phenomenon that has been reported over the years.  In 2008 a person with a cell phone caught these lights in the sky, just prior to the Sichuan earthquake.

This latest article further establishes that it is the massive pressures acting upon the rocks in the Earth’s crust that generate these lights.  Which makes sense if you consider that squeezing the right crystals generates electricity and that the original radios actually were crystal based sets.

BEIJING, Jan. 6 (Xinhuanet) — The mysterious “UFO lights” may occur at rifts, or nearly vertical faults as the crystalline structure of the magmatic stones, subjected to intense pressure, releases electrical energy, according to a study published Saturday in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

Mysterious “UFO lights”, known as “ground lights” or “earthquake lights”, sometimes appear before or during earthquakes and take a number of forms, including spheres of light orbs floating through air.

Some have confused the globular luminous air masses with UFOs. For instance, seconds before the 2009 L’Aquila, Italy, earthquake struck, pedestrians saw 10cm high flames of light flickering above the Francesco Crispi Avenue in the town’s historical city center.

In 1988 a bright purple-pink globe of light moved through the sky along the St. Lawrence River near the city of Quebec, Canada, 11 days before a powerful quake.

Scientists said the “earthquake lights” are more likely to occur on or near a rift, an elongated depression in the Earth’s crust bounded on both sides by normal faults.

Stress-activated mobile electronic charge carriers, termed positive holes, flow swiftly along stress gradients. Upon reaching the surface, they ionize air molecules and generate the observed light.

Continental rift environments now appear to be the common factor associated with earthquake.

Looking back at 65 of the recorded earthquake lights recorded in American and European documents dating from the 1600s, 85 percent appeared spatially on or near rifts, according to researchers.

“Earthquake lights as a pre-earthquake phenomenon, in combination with other types of parameters that vary prior to seismic activity, may one day help forecast the approach of a major quake,” said Robert Thiriault, Geologist of the Ministry of Natural Resources in Quebec.

Earthquake lights are a rare phenomenon though and with only about 0.5% of earthquakes worldwide occurring in places that are the right formations to create earthquake lights.  Scientists have made a list, as they are wont to do, and have listed 65 known incidents of earthquake lights.

Video of Sichuan Earthquake Lights

Earthquake Lights Mistaken for  UFOs

My reason for posting about them is that often times the lights come in ball form similar to or even related to, I suspect to ball lightning.  In these cases they are sometimes classes as UFOs since they are bright orbs in the sky.  The classic example is Jim Conacher’s photo of orange colored orbs near Tagish Lake in Canada’s Yukon.

Some research reveals that he took this photo in close proximity to the occurrence of the Cross Sound earthquake of July 1, 1973, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale.

I would suspect that it is not uncommon to expect that lights like this would be called UFOs as they would be radically different from anything we would normally expect to see in the sky.