Earthquake lights always appear

Blue flashes and floating balls of light show up in Morocco

After every sizable earthquake these days, it is inevitable that several people on social media will post a photo or video of what they claim are anomalous luminous phenomena associated with the quake. It is usually security footage that shows bright blue flashes in the distance, never close up. And it’s typically seconds before or during when the shaking is felt at the camera site. They are immediately called “earthquake lights” and some confident person asserts that they are a “well-known” and “real” phenomenon that is a result of electrical charges released by the shaking.

This is probably entirely wrong.

I collected and reviewed as much genuine research as I could about earthquake lights for many years and presented my compilation on my website Spooky Geology.

Link: Spooky Geology: Earthquake Lights

The geological concept of EQLs are complex and the manifestation is very rare. However, if you define them liberally, to the point where any light or flash during a quake is called an “earthquake light”, then they may be absurdly simple. When the ground shakes in an inhabited area, electrical wiring is pulled from its connectors and arcing and flashes occur. These flashes are blue-white and very bright. When the rest of the artificial lights of a town go out, the flashes are obvious. This is what is likely seen in almost all cases of “earthquake lights” on video sharing sites.

The problem I have so far, though, is that I’ve not seen the arcing and lights documented in the immediate vicinity during a quake. However, being that the power goes out and the mechanism is easily confirmed, we can be confident this does happen.

In some cases, people report colored clouds or balls of light in the sky. It is often difficult to pinpoint the time and location of these video reports. I’ve found some to be credibly located whereby I have found an explanation. These are pseudo-EQLs. People have heard so much about luminous anomalies that they jump to the wrong conclusions.

Link: Earthquake lights (pseudoEQLs) video from India

With the Morocco quake this week, the first video I saw was of blue-white flashes that occurred on the horizon. No shaking was apparent in the video. The video shows a time of 23:08:24 for the first flash at the far left edge and then 2 seconds later there is another flash slightly farther from the left edge.

It is not clear where this video was taken. The language barrier is a typical hindrance to finding out useful details. These lights look very much like electrical arcing/flashes from wiring. However, the timing is off. The Morocco earthquake took place at 22:11:01 UTC. This does correspond to the hour of this time zone. But not the minutes, being over two minutes earlier. Like I noted, these flashes most often appear coincident to the quake because the shaking breaks the wires. This is not evident here. So, perhaps the flashes are anomalous. Or, maybe the camera clock is off. This single video is not, unfortunately, a reliable piece of evidence.

The second video claims to show hovering light balls in the sky in Marrakech.

There is no confirmation of date or time. Also, these lights could have other prosaic explanations. Had the lights been seen traveling nearer to the ground or exiting the ground, I’d be impressed. This does not impress me. It’s not useful as evidence.

The NY Times plays it up. Even though they asked legitimate experts, they didn’t include the most obvious explanation but hyped the mystery instead.

I’m not going to link to this article because it it’s misleading nonsense. It’s disgusting to see most media relying on know-nothings spouting off on social media for their subject matter.

It would be nice if we were still in the times where people searched for information on anomalous events when they occurred. Maybe I would have seen an uptick on my Spooky Geology pages that have keywords for #earthquakelights. But this doesn’t happen anymore. People may be curious about the unknown and mysterious but they aren’t intellectually curious enough to look up better information about it.

Edit: Sorry for the typos. Fixed.