Strange Weather Related Phenomena

Submitted by Jonathan Barton, September 21, 1999

I live in a place called Shoeburyness, which is in Essex, United Kingdom. I live in the High Street, which has an army barracks at one end of the street and a twenty square mile top secret experimental establishment at the other end. There`s a stretch of beach between the army sites and the experimental base that has a beach that covers a huge area of the North Sea.

It was about January or early February of this year and it was dusk. I was on the beach with some friends and about ten miles or so out into the North Sea there were some forts and man made islands. On one of these islands there was a weird kind of mushroom shaped cloud. Lightning was coming up from the ground and into the cloud. Lightning usually lights up a big area but this only lit up the area around the island and the cloud above.

It was dusk everywhere, night kind of color except for the sky above the island that was sunset color, which was why I noticed it.

There were about twelve to fifteen people there, most of them were watching too. Have you had any other reports of lightning going up into the sky from the ground? If so please e-mail me. I`m desperate to find out what it was.

                    Yours Faithfully,
                              Jonathan Barton ( jonbarton@talk21.com )