Petrozavodsk and the Jellyfish
Early on 20 September 1977 an enormous glowing object appeared over Petrozavodsk which witnesses described as a jellyfish: it hung for several minutes, sending thin beams downward. In several buildings the windows were left with holes through them, their edges melted. The phenomenon was seen from Finland to Leningrad, and the USSR Academy of Sciences set up a group to study it. The cause is established: at 4:01 a rocket carrying the Kosmos-955 satellite lifted from Plesetsk, and the jellyfish was its exhaust in the upper atmosphere lit by a sun still below the horizon. The holes in the windows were never explained.
Piedmont and the Winter of Lights
Through the winter of 1973 this Ozarks town lived in reports of lights: a school basketball bus saw them, so did the sheriff, farmers and the pilot at the local airfield. They hung over Clearwater Lake, ran low along the roads and, by several accounts, killed the headlights of cars. Harley Rutledge, professor of physics at Southeast Missouri State, came to look into it and stayed two years: he brought spectrometers, telescopes and magnetometers and worked in the field. His report, Project Identification, appeared in 1981 and remains one of the few attempts to measure such lights with instruments rather than to interview witnesses. Rutledge reached no final conclusion.
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