Earthquake lights at L'Aquila
Before and during the 6 April 2009 L'Aquila earthquake, residents reported flashes, glowing bands and flames over the ground; researchers later collected the accounts as a key earthquake-light case.
2009 CE · 42.35, 13.40 · status: unexplained
The account
The quake killed 309 people. A local technician, Giampaolo Giuliani, had claimed radon readings foretold it, and six scientists were later tried (and finally acquitted) over reassurances given a week before.
The sceptical view
Earthquake lights are accepted as real by many geophysicists, but their mechanism is unresolved.
The researched reading
Real luminous effects around a deadly quake, mixed with power-line flashes and later memories. Earthquake lights are natural but not yet well understood.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A known natural phenomenon | 40% | Cristiano Fidani collected many independent reports of flashes, glows and flames before and during the 6 April 2009 shock; earthquake lights are well attested in rift settings like the Apennines, though their mechanism (stress-activated charges in rock, gas release) is still debated. |
| Something in the surroundings | 20% | Power lines and transformers arcing as the ground shook produce flashes that many witnesses could not tell apart from earthquake lights. |
| Undetermined | 18% | The share a generic explanation had beyond what has been shown for this case: it fits many cases like this one, but has not been demonstrated for this one. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 14% | Most accounts were collected weeks or months later from shocked survivors, when memory is easily reshaped by what others reported. |
| A cultural story | 4% | The Giuliani radon prediction and the trial of the scientists made the quake a focus of stories about omens. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 2% | No sign of fabrication among the witnesses. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 2% | The lights are an unsolved geophysical problem, not evidence of anything beyond nature. |
Official position: Geophysicists treat the L’Aquila reports as a key earthquake-light dataset; no official body has explained them.