Help me make some sense out of this experience!

[issues]

Ok, I'm the type of guy who likes to find a reasoned explanation for things I encounter then if everything is exhausted I'll begin delving into the paranormal. Keep in mind, I'm a very open-minded person but I do believe what I'm about to tell you is most likely easily explained so please don't jump onto anything extraordinary until you are sure theres no other way to go.

I went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for my vacation Friday-Monday so this happened there but on our first day, Friday. During night time, I was in the oceanside room we acquired with the sliding doors open so I could hear the ocean's noise while I slept during the night. Friday there just so happens to
be a thunderstorm passing over us at 1:30 am. Around that time I saw an awesome flash of lightning over the ocean's horizon in which I could see pretty far, so I decided before I head to bed I'd like to see that again except I'll sit on the balcony. I'm sitting here for maybe 10 minutes and just getting little flashes, at this point I'm bored so I'm about to go to bed. When two points of light parallel with each other zoom across the sky horizontally. The top point of light then does a quick burst up and then they both disappear. This all happens in about 2-3 seconds when I could keep my eyes on them. My first thought it was possible a meteor shower but it was going sideways then one went up, there were no stars out (which is what these looked like) because the sky was black and gray from the storm.


As you can imagine what first popped into my head, it frightened me for a little bit but then I tried to make some type of reasonable explanation for this thing I saw. The first reasonable thing that popped into my mind was ball lightning, as I'm not very versed in meteorology I'm not even sure what that looks like or if it even occurs that low from the clouds. So, I call on all you scientific TWCers to help me reclaim my sanity from this experience.

- - - - - - - - - - - /

- - - - - - - - - - -


- = Being the path of the two points of light
/ = Being the sudden change of course of the first point of light

P.S. Sorry for my crappy reenactment picture..

[Spurius]

Not sure, but IIRC ball lightning is only reported over land areas, not sea - and there's one theory about them that even requires a land-strike for their formation:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s520317.htm

[ajm317]

It could have been reflections off of the clouds from a ground based light source (or even an aerial one, helicopter search lights or something.)

EDIT: On the reflections idea, were you sitting outside (I THINK you were, reading your post, but I'm not sure)? If there was a pane of glass between you and the outside, then it could have been a reflection off of that.

[issues]

It could have been reflections off of the clouds from a ground based light source (or even an aerial one, helicopter search lights or something.)

EDIT: On the reflections idea, were you sitting outside (I THINK you were, reading your post, but I'm not sure)? If there was a pane of glass between you and the outside, then it could have been a reflection off of that.

Well, I was outside on a balcony, the sliding door was open so there wasn't anything in front of me (was literally me and only thing in view was the ocean and sky). Myrtle Beach does have a lot of lights on at night but where I was standing was nestled inside an overhang type of thing. The lights seemed pretty small (like I said resembling stars) but also seemingly far out. I thought about searchlights by the size of the light seemed pretty small. I've lived by a small airport before and have seen searchlights in the sky and they were pretty massive compared to these. I did, however, hang around with my video camera for a couple more minutes to try and hopefully capture it again but it never occurred any of the nights I was there unfortunately.

[Ummagumma]

Do you have any pain, you know, down there?
Just want to check they didn't give you an unnecessary probing before dismembering some cows... (sorry..)

What do you mean by going 'sideways' that would stop it from being a meteorite? Don't forget that there is a lot of refraction possible through the atmosphere, and the distances involved - combined with the way your mind sees things that are not exactly how they appear (optical illusions).
Could it be 2 meteorites that broke from a larger entity, so they would appear to be moving parallel to each other, yet one was deflected by our atmosphere? Again, with the combination of height, distance, curvature and you position it could have just appeared to move off in a right angle. As you cannot be sure how high/bright/far away they were, you cannot be sure that they were moving the way you saw them move. Even a few miles to the north/south/east/west you would have seen them moving slightly differently, you were just in the only place to see it the way you did.
Just some thoughts.

[Simetrical]

Unfortunately, it's rather hard for science to provide a good explanation for every optical phenomenon observed by a lone individual. If it's not repeatable, it can't really be analyzed. That doesn't mean it's a paranormal phenomenon, it just means that no explanation can be devised until enough resources are put into it to get a large number of well-captured cases to analyze.

That said, lightning can travel horizontally as well. People have been struck from, as I recall, a mile or more outside of the actual storm. So who knows, maybe it was just lightning.