Seeing the Strangest Light Before the Earth Quakes

What shook out deep below San Francisco in the early hours of April 18, 1906, went unseen. Yet the magnitude-8 earthquake killed untold thousands of civilians (and displaced hundreds of thousands more) and left the city in flaming ruins, under short-lived martial law and so impassable to all things horse-drawn that by one eyewitness account, at least, the temblor is what validated "the reliability of the automobile" once and for all.

But it's the thought of what could've been seen lighting up the skies high above the Bay just prior to the dawn shakes – or even during them, or just after the ground went still – that today would leave some seismologists salivating.

There are no reports of earthquake lights, curious auroras that allegedly shimmer over certain stressed-out tectonic zones and volcanic rumblings, having marked the San Francisco event. Nearly a century later, the 1906 temblor is as much remembered as a seismic shift in our scientific understanding of plate tectonics and quake-cycle models as it is for the 300-mile jolt that it shocked along the San Andreas Fault. One of the greatest natural disasters in American history was not a flashpoint in the arc of optical aerial oddities.

That would come a few decades later, when more readily available photo and film technologies would begin allowing experts and novices alike to catch the buggers as they burned around the world.

Until a rash of quakes rocked central Japan between 1965 and 1967, earthquake lights were by and large the stuff of folklore. This photo changed all that. Snapped in late September 1966 at Mt. Kimyo, Japan, it made the case for earthquake lights as legitimate areas of seismic and ionospheric research. That it flashed for nearly 90 seconds didn’t hurt, either.

Here are some alleged lights doing their thing a half hour before the 2008 quake in Sichuan province.

And here are some flashes before the 2010 Chilean temblor.

Lights have also been spotted over the 1888 Amuri quake in New Zealand, the 1930 Idu quake in Japan, the 1975 Kalapana quake in Hawaii, the 2007 quake in Peru, and the 2009 L’Aquila quake in Italy. Why there aren’t more videos (or still images that aren’t your standard fuzzball proof-of-UFO grade) of at least some of these more recent light events is unclear. (One could imagine it is a matter of simply being in the right place at the right time.) But it’s a solid accounting for these sorts of phenomena that remains even more unclear.

There are a few possible theories. It could be that the tectonic creeping of quartz-containing rock emanates strong electrical fields piezoelectrially – quite literally, under pressure – that flash and pop in the right atmospheric conditions (See: “Rocks That Crackle and Sparkle and Glow: Strange Pre-Earthquake Phenomena” (PDF), by Friedemann T. Freund.) Or it could be that Earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere get so stirred in areas of tectonic stress that the shimmers and flashes some people have reportedly seen are actually results of low-altitude recombination of ionospheric radiatives. Or, for all the conspiracy wingnutters, maybe the hushed goings on of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program could explain the lights, which often take on white and blue tones.

Then again, it could just be the human eye pulling one over on the brain. Consider the autokinetic effect, or autokinesis, an equally odd, subjective phenomena of visual perception that has one attributing movement to fixed light sources in otherwise featureless or dark environments. If there were lights over San Fran as it flattened, they could’ve all just been in the heads of a terrified, unlucky few.

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson