Lightning In the Upside Down
Note: This article is about real life upside-down lightning. That said, because I hate unsatisfying bait-and-switch articles, I also am including a theory on the red lightning in the Upside-Down in Stranger Things. This includes SPOILERS up through Episode 7 of Season 4 of Stranger Things. Click the footnote ‘1’ link at the end of this sentence if you want to read this spoiler-heavy theory on the red lightning in the Upside-Down. 1 ←
There are no Stranger Things spoilers in the rest of the main body of this article.
About 15 years ago, I became aware of the surprising existence of lightning that didn’t propagate between clouds and ground or between clouds and other clouds, but rather from the tops of clouds up into space.
There were just a few still frames from Space Shuttle and Space Station videos at the time, along with some stories from pilots of high altitude planes. But there were enough tales and splotchy pictures of these events that I began to take them seriously. And it was very fun to learn and guess about these ethereal and bizarre electrical events.
Scientists had even more fun with them than I did. They categorized the different types of upside-down lightnings and named them in appropriately fantastical ways. There are Elves, Fairies, Trolls, Pixies, and Sprites in addition to Jets and Halos.
The most remarkable thing about this still-fairly-unexplained phenomena is that the lightning can extend up all the way to space (in the case of sprites). In the diagram above, that is 100km.
As we learned a few weeks ago when discussing “Nuclear Lightning,” normal bolts of lightning have to spread through ionized channels of air (ionizing air makes it conduct electricity). So how are some of these upside down bolts able to travel through super-thin air and even into basically no air?
The answer might be found in cathode ray tubes. These tubes have had basically all the air pumped out of them, and a large voltage set between their two ends. Electrons jump off the metal inside one end and travel through the incredibly thin air to the metal at the other end of the tube. This seems to be what is happening at the very top of sprites as they enter the vacuum of space.
All of this was fairly speculative until I saw a picture just last week. Perhaps the most stunning feat of photography I have seen in a decade:
Paul M. Smith spent hundreds of hours of tedious and fastidious camera work to capture this image, by far the best photo of a sprite I have ever seen, and one of the very best I have seen taken from ground level. Please consider following Paul on Twitter ( @PaulMSmithPhoto ) or on Facebook here.
Using the categorization in the diagrams above, the diffuse red areas just above the clouds are the jets. And then as you go further up, those jets start to look like scraggly bolts categorized as sprites. I think that the jets are like electron beams that are electrons just expelled from the top of the cloud, perhaps as a reaction to the sudden electrical equalization of a cloud-to-ground strike which we cannot see here. They are expelled so powerfully that they don’t need air channels to go miles and miles up. The jets push so many electrons up into the mesosphere (high upper atmosphere) that a giant electrical potential is created. This voltage difference between the mesosphere in that area and the ionized ionosphere at the edge of space 40km above that are what further draws the burst of electrons. That drawing makes the electrons seek out the paths of least resistance, and those are the scraggle bolts that are creating ionized channels through the thin but still present mesospheric atmosphere.
But then something magical happens:
As the electrical discharges reach the edge of the atmosphere, they turn from tree-root bolts into diffuse sprays. This is the “cathode” region, where the electrons are accelerated into a vacuum instead of being conducted by ionized air.
You can see this in another of Paul’s photos also captured just in the last week:
The man really is a national scientific treasure. And these phenomena, while incredibly transient, are simply spectacular.
If you’d like to learn more about them, I recommend following Paul on social media (I have no relationship with him except admiration of his work) or you can learn more in these five links on transient lightning events.
There really is wonder all around us. Some of that is natural, some is religious, some is relational, some is philosophical. Some wonders are simply hilarious, and that humor is the blessing they bring.
What can you bring to light to share and thus bless the world?
WARNING: Strange Things Season 4 up through and including Episode 7 spoilers abound in this footnote.
At the end of Season 4 episode 7, we see that the humanoid Vecna monster in the Upside Down is actually 001 (Henry Creel). His grotesque burned appearance came from him being seared multiple times by the red lightning in the Upside Down after Eleven (Elle) forced him out of our reality and into the Upside Down (an even that happened, apparently, just before Season 1 of the show).
The remarkable thing about this lightning is that it is pretty clear that it didn’t just accidentally strike 001. Nor should there be any “natural” way he should have attracted the lightning that scared him. Thus, the lightning was apparently directed at 001, presumably by the Mindflayer. This is reasonable, because throughout the first three seasons, we regularly saw the red lightning in close proximity (and often back-lighting) the giant Mindflayer in the Upside Down.
Now, did this also turn 001 into a thrall of the Mindflayer? We don’t yet know. While the characters postulate that Vecna is a general of the Mindflayer, we actually just see that Vecna is trying to gain energy from the people he has killed in order to open portals between the worlds. We don’t yet know why he wants to open those portals. That said, given his history (of killing people in our world AND starting out in our world), it seems pretty natural that 001 would want connections back to Hawkins.
But we also have to remember that Will’s stepping into the Upside Down near the beginning of Season 1 is actually the thing that instantiated Dark Hawkins in the Upside Down. Did Vecna create the portal that allowed that? He apparently entered the Upside Down (thanks to Elle) just a little bit before Will stepped into it. So he might have made that portal.
It’s even possible that the Mindflayer never opened any portals on its own. Apparently, no portals existed before Elle pushed 001 through. That said, the project that controlled Elle and the other “gifted” children definitely was playing on the edges of the Upside Down, according to Season 2.
The lightning further does come into play, because in the origination of every portal we ever see in Stranger things, we see a red glow. And on the portal that Elle opened for 001’s passage, we see sparks of red electricity along the sinewy edges of the portal that swallowed 001. There is some sort of resonance with either Elle’s and 001’s psychic powers and the Mindflayer’s red lightning, or else the dimension-crossing energy (or energy imbalance) associated with trans-dimensional travel is tightly tied to red electricity.
Perhaps the Mindflayer figured out how to make a non-portal connection into our world around the time of Henry Creel’s childhood, and is the source of Creel’s power and the powers of the children that came out of the MK Ultra experiments. When they strongly manifest their power to do anything regarding travel between realms, the red lightning manifests. That said, when they do other things, there is no red lightning.
So it’s entirely possible that the red lightning is merely a signifier of the innate Mindflayer power that suffuses the Upside Down, and whenever someone breaches the Upside Down, the red electricity is present in smaller amounts than the immense, Mindflayer-associated red lightning bolts that backlight the Mindflayer and singed 001 into Vecna.