Strange videos have arisen in the aftermath of Morocco’s devastating earthquake, showing mysterious lights in the sky before the tremor hit.
Blue lights were seen flashing above Agadir at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, hours before the 6.8 magnitude tremor struck.
While the clips have not been verified, the unexplained sightings have baffled onlookers, with some suggesting that a UFO or lightning could be to blame.
Another possible explanation may be ‘earthquake lights’ – a rare phenomenon believed to take place in times of seismic stress.
But no one knows for sure if earthquake lights even exist, or what causes them.
‘The [Morocco] earthquake happened at nighttime,’ geophysicist Dr Friedemann Freund told The Washington Post.
‘The condition for earthquake lights to be seen by people and maybe even recorded by cameras would be relatively high.’
Long believed to be a myth, these unusual lights are thought to take place amid the changes that occur to Earth’s magnetic field during an earthquake or volcanic eruption.
The lights can take a variety of forms, whether it be a pink sphere of light or four-inch ‘flames’ above the pavement.
The latter was said to have occurred in Italy’s historic city of L’Aquila just seconds before an earthquake struck in 2009.
Meanwhile, a bright purple globe of light reportedly moved along the sky near the St. Lawrence River in Quebec in 1988, 11 days before a powerful quake.
In 2014, Dr Friedemann and his colleagues studied 65 unexplained reports of these lights from as far back as 1600.
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