The mystery of rock lightning

The masses of light hovering in the air may be just an illusion because the human brain is overly stimulated, the Austrian scientists confirmed.

Illustration of lightning strikes attacking aircraft.Photo: paranormalspy.com .

In the past few hundred years, many documents have documented the cases of people seeing bright electric blocks that range in size from golf balls to tennis balls. But the scientific community still cannot agree on the point of view and the way of forming clay rock. The main reason is that clay rock rarely occurs and their existence time is very short.

National Geographic said that people often see lightning in storms with lightning. Scientists know a lot of continuous lightning can create a strong magnetic field. Therefore, Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl - two scientists from Innsbruck University in Austria, said that it is very possible that lightning is an illusion due to the impact of electromagnetic fields on the brain or human eyes.

In many previous experiments, scientists used to put people into strong electromagnetic fields and change rapidly to see if the electromagnetic field caused hallucinations. The magnetic fields in those tests are strong enough to generate currents in brain cells without causing any harm to humans.

The results showed that when the magnetic field focused on the cortex, which controlled visual activity, the subjects were exposed to glowing lines and disc images. When the magnetic field moves inside the area of ​​the brain that controls visual activity, they see lines and shapes that move.

Peer and Kendl argue that electromagnetic fields caused by lightning can cause similar effects in humans. The two scientists think about half of the clay lightning that the documents once recorded is actually just an illusion of people created by the magnetic field.

John Abrahamson, a chemist and expert on lightning at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, said that the argument of Peer and Kendl is relatively convincing, but he still does not believe that all cases of lightning are hallucinations.

'First, the colors of the light emitted by lightning in the tests are white, gray or an unsaturated color. But according to the accounts of many witnesses, the clay that they see has a rich color - including orange, green and blue, " Abrahamson said.

In some cases, many people see a clay rock. Although observing from many different angles, the words of all witnesses about the direction of lightning are not contradictory.

'When many people observe an object and see it move to the side, we cannot say they have hallucinations', Abrahamson remarked.

Eli Jerby, a machine engineer at Tel Aviv University in Israel, used to create something like lightning in the laboratory. So he didn't think all lightning was just an illusion.

'Although hallucinations can explain some cases of clayey lightning, the impact of lightning is still a factor worth considering in both nature and laboratories. In addition, with the many achievements achieved by scientists in research, we are getting closer to creating claystone in the laboratory , 'Jerby commented.