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This is Volume 2 of the Ministry of Defence report 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region', Defence Intelligence Staff Scientific and Technical Memorandum 55/2/00, dated February 2000 and received 7 December 2000. It gathers 25 working papers on natural and man-made phenomena, meant as a reference for analysing UAP reports. The papers cover ball lightning, radar detection, balloons, satellites, mirages, plasma and similar subjects. One paper compares magnetic field experiments on human volunteers with close encounter reports. It concludes that effects from such fields are 'uncannily similar' to what witnesses describe.
“Sea”13 pages
addition of extra energy. Hence, it does not seem unreasonable that if swampgases, (if they are a component of earthlights), or even incompletely formed ball-lightning, might react to the addition of external energy. This, it is suggested, might account for the so-named 'close encounters of the fifth kind', where, it is claimed by ufologists that an airborne visual object appears to respond to, or be modified, by probing it with a terrestrial beam of energy. Since the shipping incident described at para. 11 above, was at I Band, the implications are that this is at least possible with I Band military radars (e.g. Air Intercept Radars) if the critical atmospheric conditions exist.
## OBSERVATION OF SPRITES
12. It is clear that a visible and measurable phenomenon of red (Sprites), possible with blue offshoots ('tendrils') or blue (Blue Jet) columns exist; and that they can be seen:
- From aircraft, in particular because they appear where high-flying aircraft are likely to be.
- Above severe
thunderstorms.
- On occasions from groundlevel when the cloud-breaks allow a sight-line.
The phenomena appear for a few milliseconds and could be reported as UAPs. Working Paper No. 4 confirms that the human eye will detect and possibly retain an after-image on the retina. Finally, they might be 'triggered' by a radar in the vicinity.
## BIBLIOGRAPHY:
[1] Cummer S.A. & Inan U.S. "Measurement of Charge Transfer in Sprite-Producing Lightning..." Geo. Phys. Res. Letters Vol. 24 p.1731-4 15 July 1997.
[2] Nemiroff et al. "Full Wave Calculation of 30 VLF/ LF Wave Fields Radiated from a Lightning Discharge". ISAP 1996 Proc. 1996 Int. Symp. Ant & Prop.
[3] Milikh et al. "Model of Red Sprite Optical Spectra". Geo Pages Res. Letters. Vol. 24 15 Apr. 97. Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 258 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.