(no subject)

[titusnowl]

I posted the following on the SDMB in January of 2003, and it still puzzles me (two possible explanations were proposed in the thread but neither actually jibes with what happened):

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Last Saturday (1/4) my sister took me to the mall to buy me a birthday present. (She'd wanted to buy me clothes, but knows she'll never find a good fit unless I try it on first.) On the way out of the mall, we stopped at a traffic light waiting to turn onto Western Ave in Albany. I should note here that we were at that point still in the middle of a snowstorm. Neither snow nor sleet nor dark of night will keep my elder sister from going to the mall.

Anyway, as we were waiting for the light, the sky suddenly lit up bright as day for a moment, like it does with lightning. Unlike lightning, it didn't seem to come from any one source - I didn't see a stroke or anything, it was more like somebody had flicked a switch and made the sun turn on for half a second. There was no accompanying noise either then or afterwards. When the light-stuff hit, the radio signal stopped for a second, then came back on when the light went away. Nothing happened for a while - just long enough for me to decide it had been an atomic bomb and brace myself for the coming shockwave - and then the light-stuff and resultant radio silence came again. Still no sound involved. After that our light turned green and we got on the road, and I watched out the window, but there was still no sound and the light-stuff didn't repeat itself.

Comments

[the-moonshiner.livejournal.com]

This sounds exactly like my experience of a downed telephone pole in the area. It can be a block away and it'll look like the entire sky is lighting up. Weird things happen with radios too.