Gremlins & Witches: Science Tales From the Darksyde

"The body of both the decedent and his dog were found within hours after death ... a 22 year-old male in top-notch physical condition ... he had the 'heart and lungs of a racing horse'. There are no marks, no sign of trauma internal or external, there is no bruising of the heart or brain in either cadaver. Toxicology results are negative ... What am I supposed to list as CoD? Curse of Leslie County? The Appalachian Witch?"--Leslie County, KY Medical Examiner who wished to remain anonymous

"We were at 28,000 feet .. just completed our last compass check before descending for the bomb-run ... It appeared out of nowhere, a big, reddish, Gremlin following us, just above our left wing. It was fairly dim but for a split second, I swear on my mother's grave ... I think I saw a face!" --WW 2 co-pilot who wished to remain anonymous

Witches and Gremlins? Silly superstitious stories? Nope: This stuff really happens. And among both high altitude meteorologists and remote mountain county coroners, the culprit in these disparate phenomena would oddly converge independently on the same answer.

Warning: Large Graphics Below

Lightning: It is beautiful, it is violent, it is deadly. As a former rock climber and now resident of Florida's 'lightning alley', I can personally attest to all three. Just last Thursday our home took a direct hit. It melted the outside phone line and tripped every breaker. From inside it was as if the interior was bathed by a pulse of a hundred violet-white lasers. Beautiful indeed: The dazzling after image lingered for several minutes and the crack of thunder about blew my eardrums out. There's a reason we use two surge protectors in series to insulate our PC here at DarkSyde Manor.

In the fall of 1987 two climber friends of mine were at the top of Red Garden Wall overlooking Boulder's Eldorado Canyon, when lightning came snaking sideways out of a cloud five miles to the west. One was killed instantly. The other was just beginning the first of several long rappels to get to the ground. He was knocked out cold, the sling carrying his carabiners and metal gear melted and seared into his flesh, the lightning blew out an exit wound the size of Ping-Pong ball in his foot. He went zinging down the rope so fast his rappelling device was scorched. If a piece of his Gortex jacket hadn't become hung up in the works, he would have sailed right off the end of the line into open air and fallen the remaining 800 feet to his death. Even so, he barely made it. Saved only by his youth, a quick evac, and a cadio-pulmonary resuscitation team. It took a pacemaker, three-weeks in the hospital, and a year of respiratory and physical therapy, to recover.

Lightning is second only to floods as the leading weather related cause of death. In the US more people are killed by lightning than hurricane winds, tornados, mudslides, earthquakes, and blizzards put together. In a split second you can be struck walking your dog, taking out the trash, or even sitting quietly inside your home! Lightning can whack a tree, splash over to your house, dance down the metal frame work or siding to a phone jack, and walk right up the line to the receiver, zapping you in mid-sentence. It can get into the plumbing and cook your goose in the shower or bathtub. And despite the prevailing wisdom, occupants in cars are not fully immune.

The strokes contain up to a billion volts and thousands of amps, more than enough to fry your neural circuitry, turn your internal organs into steamed mush, and fuse your blood into a crusty, congealed, solid. But because it kills selectively in singles, randomly, here and there, it rarely makes the headlines.

For most of recorded history thunder and lightning was attributed to various gods, goddesses, and godlets. It didn't take a Shaman with a direct line to the sky to tell you whoever it was up there, rampaging about in the heavens causing a ruckus, they were pretty pissed off about something. And of course the clever Shaman and Chief were both quick to capitalize on their special relationship with YVWH/Odin/Vishnu and give advice lest you be smited during the stormy temper tantrums. By odd coincidence, that always seemed to involve obeying the Head Shaman's every batshit crazy whim and giving him all your best stuff. Good thing we enlightened Americans would never fall for that kind of mystical bullshit anymore or we might get taken for a ride, eh?  

But for now, at least until the anti-science wing of the GOP gets their slimy mitts on the science behind thunderstorms and plasma physics, the modern theory of how cloud to ground lightning is produced revolves around more mundane phenomena we all know from childhood: Static Electricity. Shuffle around the carpet and then sneak up and touch mom, or better yet little sister, and you can make a big pop, and (delightfully) scare the shit out of her. Lightning is a giant version of that mischievous prank.

Way up in the top of a growing thunder storm, in the heart of those black anvil-shaped clouds, there is moisture and lots of it. As the water vapor rises into the frigid air it condenses into tiny droplets. It's usually below freezing up there, so the droplets turn to ice. Some combine with other icy droplets and get heavy, heavy enough to fall through the upwelling currents of warmer air forcing the cloud top higher and higher. As these heavier pellets fall, they rip through the fog of smaller ice crystals below and create a static charge differential just like big brother rubbing his feet on the carpet. The larger ice pellets melt eventually (Usually anyway; if not it's a hail storm) and strike the surface as rain, taking their charge with them. The opposite charge is left high in the clouds. This process repeats over and over on a massive scale; there are many zillions of rain drops each carrying a minuscule bit of charge. The over all effect adds up to an enormous voltage potential between the clouds and the surface. One just begging to be rebalanced.

What happens next is a mostly invisible current called a 'step-leader' snakes out of the charged cloud. It zig-zags its way down towards the earth, throwing off side branches, sometimes taking a sideways detour for miles, until it's a few hundred feet away from the ground. At that point, barely visible positive plasma streamers began rising from all kinds of objects on the surface, dozens can rise from a single building or yard. When the first lucky streamer makes contact with the step-leader ... CRACK! The circuit is closed, electricity surges down the new conduit as well as up from any side branches the step-leader created, in what is called the return stroke. And there's your lightning.

1) The step-leader descends from the negative charge, 2) when it nears the ground a positive streamer is launched off the house, 3) when the two connect, the return stroke forms draining the excess charge from the cloudy region around each branch of the original step-leader.

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Side branches from a previous step-leader feed back into the return stroke once the cloud to ground circuit is closed forming a feathery fractal pattern

A rare split-second natural phenomena is captured by the camera: This tree launched two positive streamers. The short one to the left was beaten to the edge of the step-leader by another to the right, producing the massive return stroke. Ben Goshi adds: [This] incredible photo of the lightning hitting and going through that tree was in Alabama (around Demopolis, I think, but don't hold me to it).

It doesn't matter if you're standing next to a microwave relay tower, if you feel your hair stand on end in the middle of a thunderstorm, get the hell out of there or drop to the ground toot sweet: Odds are you are launching a positive streamer off your head and it's racing to meet that step-leader!

The higher the object the more likely it will meet the step-leader first. This is the idea behind lightning rods; although the benefit of such devices is minimal, there's a lot of chance involved. Recently a guy came through my neighborhood selling lightning rods door to door. One homeowner bought one and was in the process of installing it, when my NASA engineer buddy down the street happened to ask them how they planned to attach the ground? The gullible buyer had no clue what grounding was or why it would matter!

Speaking of lightning rods and gullibility ... Inspired by an episode of Penn and Teller's program Bullshit, Unscrewing the Inscrutable (UTI) is proud to introduce the "Lightning Rod Helmut". Unlike cheap imitators, UTI's quality thunderstorm hat features a lightweight telescoping lightning rod made from space-age, silver-plated nickel-iron, and crafted into our patented shape tested in UTI's state of the art Rasmussen Lightning Lab. The LRH fits securely to an interior wire mesh covering the wearers noggin for added conductivity into the thickest skull! (Optional metal shoes not included)

                 

The UTI Lightning Rod Helmut makes a great gift for the hated ex-spouse, or the suicidal whiner always calling you up and threatening to 'do it', if you don't stop everything and rush over to hug them. The LRH sends that subtle yet unmistakable message that you don't give a hoot if the asshole screwing up your life drops dead. Or don it in the middle of a rant from those pesky religious lunatics of any faith and dare them to have their omnipotent deity strike you down! And coming soon, the UTI Lightning Rod Baby Carriage for the demon-spawn of those assholes you hate!

Ball Lightning was once relegated to the category of myth. But the phenomena now seems real enough even though the physics is a bit unclear. Bearing in mind I'm no expert, the best explanation I've heard revolves around a combination of electrical activity and intense heat acting on a tiny piece of metal or other material. The more common type, often seen 'running' along or skimming just above the ground with a web of small bolts following along, is plausibly just a tiny scrap of incandescent material (Metal, wood, etc.) which has been heated to a plasma by the electric fields produced in thunderstorms near strikes. Stripped of its electrons, the heated fragment becomes a powerful source of positive charge and gets flung like a particle in an accelerator. It might also launch positive streamers producing successive, small, return strokes centered on the object, usually until it vaporizes, giving rise to the brilliant 'fireworks' effect. Since various metals/substances emit different visible wavelengths and possess divergent electrical properties, this would explain the range of color and effects seen in ball lightning. If this scenario is correct, you can see a miniature version of ball lightning in the shower of plasma sparks coming off an arc welder.

         

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Enigmatic images of Ball Lightning

During the nighttime bombing campaign over Europe in the midst of World War Two and in the early days of high altitude/aerospace research over the next several decades, pilots often returned with strange tales about even weirder optical phenomena than ball lightning. Glowing, expanding rings, fat carrot-shaped apparitions that seemed to follow them through the skies, dancing waifs of light right at the boundary of visual acuity, enigmatic blue pulses, cones of fire ... And like clouds or the occasional grilled cheese sandwich, it's in our nature to see human forms in all kinds of objects; bodies, faces, eyes. The reports were usually written off by flight surgeons as high altitude hallucinations (Or good natured hoaxes) by exhausted crew, scared to death and tweaked out on fight-or-flight factors.  Quietly however, among the cadre of seasoned bomber crews and the personnel of the infamous Lockheed Skunk Works, the whispered tales of eerie glowing Gremlins, mischievous spectres seen dancing off silvered wingtips at the edge of space, grew until they became part of aviation folklore.

           


One of the few color pictures of a Red Sprite over a Blue Jet, the latter encased in a cloud. This one was unusually large, making it visible from the orbiting camera

Here is where modern science meets modern myth: They actually do exist, and have now been definitively recorded by NASA and other high altitude cameras! But they are neither sentient creatures nor meddling poltergeists. These bizarre apparitions are real optical phenomena, currently grouped into a number of categories including Red Sprites, Blue Jets, and Elfin Rings.

These ariel denizens are poorly understood. Obviously they're probably caused by electromagnetic fields interacting with charged particles. But the details remain elusive; they're terribly difficult to study, occurring randomly and high in the stratosphere. Red Sprites and Elves in particular match the luminosity of Aurora Borealis giving us at least a hint of what may be going on. Vast, powerful electric fields form high above cloud tops during intense thunderstorms. It's plausible that these field interfere with the earth's magnetic field, at times distorting it or weakening it momentarily at specific locations above the storm.

One possible scenario: The node in the earth's field thus produced allows charged particles from the sun, which are usually caught in the earth's field and spiral in until they're channeled into the weak regions near the poles, to be concentrated close to and above the thunderstorm. Surplus charge (electrons or protons) in the thunderhead are drawn upward at high velocity to the source of opposite charge. Likewise, opposite charge (electrons or protons) are drawn down and, when either stream strikes the ionosphere, they might produce the expanding ring effect. Along the way protons and electrons meet up, forming an energized hydrogen atom which steps down through it's energy states. And as any physics geek knows, hydrogen emits both red and bluish wavelengths when excited. The dim short-wave blue would scatter pretty fast. The longer, dim red wavelengths would penetrate much farther, producing the optical reds and purples of what we call Red Sprites as seen from a distance. Since the particles are 'shot' out in a natural version of a particle beam weapon, you get the distinctive carrot-like shape.

Pretty neat huh? Unfortunately there's little observational evidence to support that explanation. So keep in mind it's only one, highly oversimplified, possibility and one which I probably garbled the hell out of. It's 'just a theory' (After all these things could be intelligently designed by an unknown err ... entity ... <cough ... "Thor" ... cough>)

Lightning and related displays are by no means limited to the earth. They occur on both planets, moons, and in the corona of our own sun! There is even some indication that lighting might play between the rings of Saturn and the planet; that would be some serious lightning!

                 

Lightning on Jupiter (Enlarge)         Saturnian Sprite? (Enlarge)

                               

In artist's rendition: Left an electrostatic Jovian Dawn, by Don Dixon. Right Saturnian Ring Lightning from NASA illustrations.

When lightning strikes the surface it doesn't stop there. In urban areas it will quickly find a metal conduit, a water line for example, and ground out through the network of pipes. The rocky/sandy subterranean pathway between the surface strike and the metal ground is often fused into glass and later recovered as a fulgurite, below. But when lightning strikes in the wilderness, away from water mains and underground cable lines, it spreads out randomly. following conductive mineral laden veins and/or underground moisture.

Fused white-sand Fulgurite. This natural 'lightning glass' is a frozen record of a bolt grounding into an under ground water pipe near the Florida Keys

And the unexplained deaths in the wilderness? They've been reported from the Appalachian Mountains as evidence of witchcraft, to the Rockies. To get a handle on that mystery it's important to understand that lightning kills in several ways. The most common fatalities stem from burns, internal and external, and secondary infection. But another big danger is cardiac arrhythmia, fibrillation, and pulmonary collapse.

In a populated area when someone is incapacitated they're usually around other people and have convenient access to EMS and Hospital ER's. It's fairly common for lightning strike survivors to have cardiac or breathing problems which require a pacemaker or a ventilator, sometimes for a short period, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Occasionally someone is brought in with cardiac problems or in extreme respiratory distress who was just near a strike and doesn't show external burns or any sign of electrocution. In most cases it's a good bet that there is internal damage that would show in an autopsy, but is that a valid assumption in every case?

Massive electrical flows produce not just a current, but a powerful magnetic field. And especially in the wilderness with multiple strikes in the same small area and all that current surging around underground with no metal grounds, jumping along seams containing melt water and semiconducting rocky minerals, the local chaotic flux just above ground could become immense. In some rare cases if a person or animal is unlucky enough to be in the right spot, in the vortex of an invisible magnetic 'tornado', the intense magnetic field might conceivably overwhelm the sensitive electrochemical process by which nerves propagate their signal down the axon. Even hundreds of yards away from strikes, under the right set of conditions, the effect would be to either lock the nerves up so that they can't fire at all, or cause them to fire wildly, flickering on and off like a strobe light. That would mean everything neurological (And muscular) would go haywire, from the cerebral cortex to the spinal cord, from the heart to the smooth muscle tissue. The mental effects would be similar to electroshock therapy, including loss of consciousness and temporary to permanent amnesia. The physical effects could include loss of motor control, spasms and paralysis of the diaphragm, fatal cardiac arrhythmia, and/or immediate fibrillation.

If that happens to a person and their dog (or a wild animal) out in the woods on their own, they have no one to give CPR, no one to call EMS, no hospital resuscitation team to restart their heart and ventilate the lungs. And they're either unconscious, or dazed and confused, unable to breathe properly, and often suffering other severe neuromuscular problems. Sooner or later, it may be immediate or it could take hours, their central nerve system simply stops working, their heart stops beating, like a light switch being flipped off. There are no marks, no burns, no internal damage. And that's the mystery explained, that's the connection between Gremlins first described in World War Two and the old Mountain Witch's Curse.

Of course lightning does a lot of good stuff also. The production of nitric acid in the middle of thunderstorms provides fertilizer for the plants we depend on for air and food. Lightning also acts as a simple method for measuring global warming; the hotter our atmosphere gets the more thunderstorms it produces, and the rate and number of global lightning strikes are conveniently detectable and recordable from earth orbit.

And it is picturesque. An exquisite display of nature's raw beauty. So without further adieu, some stunning pics of lightning, and the sound of thunder.

Thunder MP-3 (Play)

                   Yikes! Aaaall aboard!

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         Multiple strikes light up Tucson's skyline in this 30 sec exposure

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        The Empire State Building gets hit dozens of times a year

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An airliner wanders in between a step-leader and a positive streamer completing the circuit. Despite appearances, air borne objects are less likely to be damaged by lightning strikes than those on the surface -- the latter provide a much better ground for the current to flow through

So the next time you get a chance to see a lightning storm, up close and personal, be damn careful! Yeah it's neat to watch and grand to behold. But don't volunteer to be a human lightning rod. And stay alert for ghostly apparitions or invisible curses: There be Gremlins and Witches in them clouds, writhing magnetic fields and fatal energy vortices, hiding in those splendid thunderstorms, just waiting to jump out and get you!