Internet Abuzz After Mysterious Red Lights Spotted In Atlantic Ocean

Photos posted on Reddit claiming to be a swath of red lights seen over the Atlantic has sparked a debate over just what, exactly, is going on.

“Mysterious red glow seen over the Atlantic, pilot says he’s never seen anything like it,” wrote redditor /mohiemen in the “Damnthatsinteresting” forum.

And of course, what good would pictures of mysterious red ocean lights be without apocalyptic replies?

“If I’m not wrong, the first DOOM game was set in 2022, so this is it. There comes the demons. There is the end…” -/u/ChinuCODM

The jokes continued for a while…

As Interesting Engineering notes, A similar phenomenon was spotted in 2014 by pilot JPC Van Heijst. 

“In the night of 24-25 August 2014, I flew a 747-8 from Hong Kong to Anchorage. While flying over the vast Pacific Ocean, somewhere southeast of the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula, I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. Around five hours into our flight with Japan a long time behind us, we were cruising at a comfortable 34.000 ft with about four and half hours to go towards Alaska. Over the radio, we heard Air Traffic Control talking to other planes that were heading for the US West Coast about diversions due to major earthquakes in San Francisco,” wrote the pilot, who then described what he saw in the sky.

“I noticed a deep red/orange glow appearing ahead of us, and this was confirmed when I looked at preview of the photos on the back of my camera. There was supposed to be nothing but endless ocean below for hundreds of miles around us. They initially appeared as a distant city or group of typical Asian squid fishing boats, but this did not make sense in this area. The lights we saw were much larger in size than your average city or group of boats, but they also glowed red and orange, instead of the normal yellow and white that cities or ships would produce.”

“The closer we got, the more intense the glow became, illuminating the clouds and sky below us in a scary orange glow that you would expect with a massive fire on the ground. In a part of the world where there was supposed to be nothing but water.”

That said, the least-fun answer goes to…

Redditor Musicide, who points out that the red lights could be “boats equipped with large arrays of red LED panels for Saury fishing.”

Which begs the question – why hasn’t this phenomenon been seen more frequently?