How a Burst of Light in the Sky Illuminated Something Primal
by Brooke Jarvis
At around 9 o’clock on the night of March 25, the sky above my house in Seattle lit up with an astonishing display. I know this not because I happened to see it — I was inside, as I am too often, working at my computer — but because my Twitter feed was suddenly full of different versions of the same, uncanny video. The earliest clips captured what looked like a single streak of light, fracturing outward into a shimmering cascade. What came next looked like the world’s largest and longest-lasting firework, or a huge shower of comets hitting all at once, or a waterfall of light falling sideways.
It was golden, spectacular, alarming, otherworldly, indecipherable, unknown. While the cameras rolled, I could hear the voices of the people pointing them upward. Again and again, in tones ranging from rapturous to fearful (and using a variety of expletives, depending on the personality of the videographer), they looked to the sky and asked, “What is that?”