I’ve never gotten to see the Northern Lights… or rather, I’ve never seen what the National Geographic photos showed me when I was young: the cinematic special effects, the shimmering curtains of light…
… but I might have seen some simpler ones. I was on a red-eye from Seattle to Chicago. Just about the only passenger on the plane with all the lights out, staring down and marveling at all the blank spaces on the map. Suddenly a city came in view, or maybe some sprawling industrial complex, greenish lights stretching out in straight lines, with bluish lights clustered where they intersected. Is this some Monsanto plant that a city grew up around? Or a remote Amazon warehouse community? But then why no white lights that people could see by, or orange parking lot lighting?
I checked maps (pre-internet) when I got home, and I would’ve been over Eastern Montana at 3am.
Later I checked Google Maps (and just re-checked), and the fields of spring wheat west of Ekalaka, MT are indeed MT of lights.
.
eta: I also just checked the altitude, and we were flying much too high to have seen my “city” at that angle… so I was seeing lighted lines that were floating about two miles above the ground.
Guess I can stop looking for mystery government complexes now.