A pilot saw a fiery red glow on July 22 as he flew over clouds over the Atlantic Ocean, and images of the eerie scene were recently shared on reddit hoping to unravel the mystery.
Three images from the encounter sparked raging comments on the social media platform, as thousands flocked to the post to share their thoughts on what glowed beneath the clouds.
Some users said the incident must mark the end of time, while other users compared it to the Netflix series Weird stuff.
“Dustin is trying to open a portal to the upside down — it’s literally a water gate,” one Redditor said, referring to a scene from the show’s fourth season.
While many of the comments were outrageous, someone suggested it could be a large fishing boat using red lights to attract mackerel fish.
However, the cause cannot be determined with certainty without further inspection.
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Pictured is an image the pilot took on July 22. He said this is something he’s never seen before
Mackerel fishing, traditionally found in the Pacific, uses huge LED lights on fishing boats to attract fish, making them easy to scoop up into nets.
However, there is a type of Atlantic saury that is found from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada to Bermuda.
And the ships used to catch these fish have hundreds of red lights around the perimeter.
While LED is the preferred option for fishing boats, due to its higher efficiency and lower weight, the fishing boat below could use a different lighting solution such as High Intensity Discharge (HID).
Some users said the incident must mark the end of time, while other users compared it to the Netflix series Stranger Things (pictured)
While many of the comments about what the red glow could be were outrageous, someone suggested it could be a large fishing boat using red lights to attract mackerel fish
The intense glow from high above the clouds suggests that HID may have been in use, explaining how much light escaped upward.
“Maybe fishing vessels have never clustered so much to concentrate so much light? Three possible scenarios. 1. Fish populations to small concentrations. 2. Chinese fishing boats have been fishing in the Pacific and are now factory fishing in the Atlantic. 3. Atlantic fishing boats have adopted China’s factory fishing strategy. None of these are good results. Good luck to those fish,” one Redditor said.
Another pilot had a similar encounter in 2014 when he and his copilot flew over glowing clouds south of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula during a Boeing 747-8 flight from Hong Kong to Anchorage, Alaska.
The pilot was sailing across the Atlantic when he saw the glow. Although many have speculations, the cause cannot be confirmed
Dutch pilot JPC van Heijst explained on PBase how, five hours after the ten-hour flight, they saw an intense flash of light like a bolt of lightning, pointing vertically up in the distance.
This was followed 20 minutes later by a deep red and orange glow.
And the experience left Van Heijst somewhat troubled, due to the lack of an explanation for what happened.
There were no thunderstorms on their route or weather radar, suggesting the lightning isn’t coming from a storm.
The glow was also a mystery; similar lights have been spotted from boats that fish for squid, but van Heijst says this “makes no sense in this area.”
“The closer we got, the more intense the glow became, illuminating the clouds and the sky below us in an eerie orange glow, in a part of the world where there would be nothing but water,” he continued.
“The only cause of this red glow we could think of was the explosion of a huge volcano just below the ocean’s surface about 30 minutes before we flew over that exact position.”
Van Heijst was then nervous to encounter an ash plume in the middle of the night, but luckily they encountered nothing like it.
Before the flight, they had heard over the radio about earthquakes in Iceland, Chile and San Francisco.
But despite being a few volcanoes on their route, they weren’t warned of new activity — though this doesn’t necessarily include unseen underwater volcanoes.