By Ian O’Neill
Norway often has strange lights dancing around the night sky, but early this morning it wasn’t the aurora that captivated many eyewitnesses in the north of the country. A giant spiral had appeared, and so far there’s little explanation as to what might have caused the phenomenon.
“It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in color to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end,” said Nick Banbury of Harstad, Norway. “This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to the earth.
“According to the press, this could be seen all over northern Norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart.”
The near-perfect spiral appeared at 7:50 a.m. and already the conspiracy theories are out in full-force. Is it some kind of energy weapon? Or was it the Large Hadron Collider (which, coincidentally, has just broken the world record for the most powerful particle collision of all time)?
One thing’s for sure, when I spent five months living in the Arctic Circle (on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard), I never saw anything quite like this in the sky — no matter how much øl I’d consumed.
Conspiracies to one side, there’s actually a potentially mundane answer to the whole thing, althought it’s still pretty interesting.
From Dec. 7-10, there was an alert that the Russian Navy was going to carry out missile tests from the White Sea. However, the Northern Fleet denies any knowledge of the incident.
Could it be some kind of missile test? Yes, says Doug Ellison who created the following animation (posted on The Universe Today) of a spent rocket stage spilling fuel into the atmosphere. The rising sun then did the rest, illuminating the spiral.
http://news.discovery.com/space/mystery-spiral-appears-over-norway.html
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