Unknown orange-red glow over Pacific Ocean - August 24, 2014

August 30, 2014 - Earlier this week a pilot and his co-pilot spotted a mysterious orange and red glow while flying over the Pacific Ocean.

The strange lights baffled the pilots, with no obvious explanation available.

But a NASA researcher has told MailOnline that he thinks the answer may lie in an 'energised bubble' in Earth's atmosphere caused by either solar wind, a powerful microwave beam or even a controversial research station in Alaska.

'I could imagine that something from the solar wind, possibly a small highly energised bubble that penetrated the protective shield of the magnetosphere, hit the Earth's uppermost atmosphere and produced this very local effect,' Nasa researcher Dr Friedemann Freund, told MailOnline.

'Alternatively the ionospheric research station Haarp [High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program] in Alaska might have sent some powerful microwave beams to the ionosphere and created this local instability.'

Haarp is an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

It was established to analyse the ionosphere - a region of the upper atmosphere - and investigate the development of ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance.

The station regularly uses a tool called the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a high-power radio frequency transmitter facility operating in the high frequency band. It is used to temporarily excite a limited area of the Ionosphere.

Haarp has been the subject of numerous unfounded conspiracy theories. ...hummm really

It has been blamed for hurricanes, thunderstorms, major power outages and more, but no convincing evidence supports any of the claims.

The strange lights were spotted south of the Russian peninsula Kamchatka during the flight of a Boeing 747-8 from Hong Kong to Anchorage, Alaska.

Previously, it has been thought that they may have originated from the explosion of a huge volcano under the surface of the ocean.

On the nature of the lights themselves, Dr Freund adds: 'The dominant colours in the photographs are green and red.

'The green appears to be the same as aurora lights which are known to arise from an electronically highly excited state of oxygen atoms, decaying to the ground state by emitting light at 557.

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