Ghostly Floating Lights With Cylindrical Beams Seen in Jeju, South Korea [Look]

SOUTH KOREA-Several photographs show a weird hovering light beyond Jeju City, South Korea. Light columns are optical meteorological phenomena caused by small ice crystals. Mysterious soaring lights have arisen over the South Korean city of Jeju City, with photographs of the cylindrical beams getting posted on Reddit.

"They've been here for almost an hour," said the Reddit user in a comment that earned over 18,000 likes. Other users speculated that the blazing ghost lights were the handiwork of aliens,

But Alex O'Brien, a meteorologist with KOAA News5 in Colorado Springs, informed Newsweek that perhaps the illuminations are based on something much more earthly. The light pillars are visual atmospheric occurrences in which columns of light seem to shoot up from the earth through into the sky, as O'Brien describes.

Cause of the Lighting Phenomena

The lights are caused by microscopic ice crystals that develop in the heavens and remain dormant in the atmosphere near the Earth's surface. O'Brien emphasized that the hanging ice crystals are excellent reflectors, reflecting city lights down eventually to one's eyes or camera lens. Typically, they are plate-shaped tiny particles that grow at temperatures ranging from 14 to -40 degrees Fahrenheit.

In other terms, for such an occurrence to transpire, the weather must be chilly. The optimized parameters for this to transpire are on a freezing winter night-often subzero temperatures-with humid conditions and minimal to no wind, O'Brien continued.

While these circumstances are not unknown in the United States, they are far rarer in temperate locations like South Korea. The ambient temperature did not dip below 55 degrees Fahrenheit on the evening in question. Furthermore, the humidity was extremely high, averaging 72%, and there was barely any wind. These circumstances would have most likely aided in the development of the lighting pillars.

Light pillars can persist for hours, depending on the conditions. They will be visible all evening as long as the weather circumstances stay the same, as per O'Brien. As the temperature lowers more, keen skywatchers may capture a glimpse of these eerie lights. In witnessing such light pillars, one must have to be outside at the coldest portion of a freezing and damp night and should be near a city so that lights may be reflected.

Other Lighting Occurrences

Days before this occurrence, will-o-the-wisps, the old name for ghost lights, was sighted in the US. They cast a strange light over wetlands or bogs. People nowadays describe odd lights in the sky in all kinds of settings, typically above roads. Some are more well-known than others. The iconic Marfa lights are located in the desert-like Davis Mountains in Marfa, Texas, and are the nearest ghost lights to EarthSky's city of Austin. Strange lights have also been seen along the Blue Ridge Parkway at Brown Mountain in North Carolina, near the little hamlet of St. Louis in Saskatchewan, Canada, and along prominent U.S. highways. Route 66 and other parts of North America

Some of these lights have modern, fairly conventional interpretations. Nonetheless, individuals like attempting to locate them, following the report from Earth Sky. People nowadays would travel considerable miles to observe ghostly lights in the sky. The Marfa Lights are a well-known example in Texas. For years, people have reported seeing them in the tiny and isolated (and, in recent decades, trendy) West Texas town of Marfa.

According to a travel report from BBC, enthusiasts have all reported witnessing pulsing, colorful balls of light near the Paisano Pass, an isolated stretch of prairie southeast of Marfa. On clear evenings as the sun sets, visitors from all over the world go to the highway Marfa Lights Viewing Area outside this one-horse hamlet, hoping to get a glimpse of this strange phenomenon.

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