Tuesday, March 6, 2012

St. Elmo's Fire

As a member of a flight crew on a Navy P2V5F Neptune aircraft we were far out over the Atlantic Ocean on a night patrol in 1959. We were having a bit of a problem.  Our starboard main engine was backfiring and belching flame back over the wing. It was pretty in a way when the bright red, blue, and yellow hues cascaded over the arch of the wing, yet scary too as a fear of the unknown sort of thing.  I was ordered to leave my bow observer position in the nose bubble, and come up above with the rest of the crew.  If that flying machine, no matter how good it was, went into the water the plastic nose bubble was not a good place, as if any part of the aircraft would be.  I went to the after station to sit and converse with the ordnanceman.
If the flames sending tendrils over the wing were not enough to command our attention suddenly along a bulkhead there appeared a gaseous object about the size of a basketball. It was a shade of fluorescent green, and was slowly creeping along traveling toward the front of the plane.  It seemed sinister somehow added to an engine problem hundreds of miles east of the Atlantic coast of America.  I approached it and was able to easily push my hand into it, and then withdraw it with no seeming effect. At the same time I was able to use my hand to move it along the bulkhead nearly like rolling a ball on the floor.  While my hand was immersed in it, and afterwards for a short period, the hair on my arm stood straight up in the same manner as static electricity would make it do.  The green haze remained for several minutes, and then disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as it had arrived.
I was later told that the phenomenon was named St Elmo's Fire after the patron saint of sailors. In the days of iron men on wooden ships it was considered good luck to spot it, and I tend to agree, as my presence here attests we made it back to a safe landing that dark and rain swept night.

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