Mundane and pointless, yes indeed. But really kind of cool.
I was driving along a highway a few days ago well after dark, when my (adult) daughter said, “Hey, what are those lights?” When I turned to look, there were four beams of white light nearby, each extending up into the sky a hundred feet or more. It was quite beautiful.
“Searchlights?” I hazarded. The light looked about the right consistency, if you know what I mean–white and powerful, like a searchlight or a very large flashlight beam. But the beams didn’t seem to get any wider as they went up, cone-style as searchlights and flashlights typically do. Instead they were staying the same diameter as far as we could tell.
“Don’t searchlights usually go back and forth?” my wife asked. “These are just staying in one place.”
Which was true. Also, we were in the middle of nowhere, and as far as I knew there was no facility nearby that used searchlights.
“It almost looks like the top of a fountain,” my daughter pointed out, and she was right, except that of course it looked much too tall to be a fountain stream and it was approximately three degrees Fahrenheit outside.
We watched for a couple of minutes, wondering what it was and enjoying the sight (well, they did, I was busy keeping my eyes on the road), and then we rounded a benmd and the nearest beam dissolved all at once and the whole thing became clear–the beams were simply the headlights of oncoming cars too far away to be seen, focused and “sent” directly upward as a result of some strange atmospheric condition or other. “Ohhh,” we all said as the beam broke into a perfectly ordinary pair of headlights, clearly visible as two points of light and widening from the origin as is the general rule for headlights from cars you can see. “Cool,” we said as another beam did the same a few seconds later, and so on till all four were past us. Whereupon another beam, same as the others, had become visible in the distance, looking strong and steady enough to climb…
We enjoyed the show for about the next twenty miles, until something changed and the not-yet-visible headlights were back to being a vague glow on the horizon. But it was extremely neat while it lasted.
In fifty plus years on this planet and thirty plus years of driving, includi9ng a good chunk along dark rural interstates, I have never encountered anything quite like this, though I am sure it’s happened frequently before. I expect some of you have seen it as well. Anyway, mundane and pointless, and really, really neat.
(Info: This was 12/30 at about 10 PM on I-80 in western PA. Hilly territory but not especially high altitude even for PA. There was cloud cover, but pretty high up, nothing like fog, and what the flashing neon signs along the road called “snow squalls,” which was an apt descriptor. The show continued whether it was snowing or whether it was not, though it never did snow especially hard. And the temperature, as noted, was in the 0-5 degree range. I don’t know enough about weather and reflections and such to know what if anything played a role in making the show possible; if you have an idea I’d love to hear it.)