UPPER ATMOSPHERIC LIGHTNING OVER ITALY
There’s a famous scene in the movie Independence Day where the alien mothership deploys its lightning weapon over the White House. It looked something like the above pic.
This is not a scene from a movie. It’s a real photo of upper atmospheric lightning taken on Nov. 28th by Valter Binotto of Possagno, Italy. "This is a rare double formation of sprites and ELVEs," he says.
The sprites are the red, tentacled objects in the middle. The red 'flying saucer' surrounding them is the ELVE.
"Both were sparked by a single powerful lightning bolt over the Adriatic Sea," adds Binotto. "The positive lightning strike had a peak current of 387 kA, about ten times greater than a normal lightning bolt."
Even professional monitoring stations rarely catch both phenomena at once. For example, a 2025 conference paper from the Pierre Auger Observatory describes their first clearly simultaneous observations using dedicated TLE cameras. The fact that they’re publishing "first observations" in 2024–2025 tells you this combination is noteworthy.
ELVEs are harder to catch than sprites in part because they require very strong lightning--the kind of bolt that generates an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The red ring marks the spot where the EMP hit Earth's ionosphere, fading away after less than a millisecond.
"Thanks to the stars present, I was able to measure the altitude of the ELVE at about 85 km and its diameter at about 230 km," says Binotto.
For comparison, the mothership in Independence Day was 550 km in diameter, so this ELVE was a lesser but worthy rival.