It is likely that some real and interested phenomena may be buried in the noise. A good example is a recent discovery about lightning. Lightning has been studied for about two centuries, and scientists felt that it was fairly well understood. Recently and unexpectedly a whole new class of lightning was discovered. The red sprites, which may be pink or red, are many miles wide and rise to heights of 60 miles.
Blue jets are cone shaped with their apex atop the clouds.
They extend to heights of about 20 miles. While red sprites appear all at once, the blue jets move upward from the cloud tops. The new class of lightning was first photographed by accident in 1989 when a retired physicist, Dr. John R. Winckler, was helping a friend try out a new low light video camera. A check of videos of thunderstorms taken by the space shuttles revealed more examples of this new and strange lightning. Soon searches for the phenomena were easily succeeding and it is now being widely investigated.