During the August 15 earthquake in Peru, stunning lights were seen flashing over the horizon in the nation's capital, Lima, some 200 Km north of the 8.0 quake's epicenter in Peru's southern desert, at the boundary where the Nazca and South American tectonic plates meet. According to the USGS the earthquake occurred as thrust-faulting on the interface between the two plates, with the South American plate moving up and seaward over the Nazca plate. (1)

But the lights, what about the lights that some locals compare to those of an atomic explosion? Also blue lights, strange red lights, and some even stranger moving lights seen in videos now featured at You Tube: Luces azules en el cielo, Luces extrañas en el cielo, Peru Terremoto Extrañas Luces Rojas En El Cielo, Resplandores durante el terremoto en Peru. (2)

Luis Trujillano, from Radio Programas Perú, reports that people, mostly the young set, are furiously surfing the Internet in search of answers. Are these phenomena related to UFO's? That is one unavoidable question if you recall the spectacular May 11 sighting of nothing less than a fleet of UFO's over Lima. (3) You can watch the video here.

Physicist Modesto Montoya, from the Peruvian Nuclear Energy Institute, is adamant in his defense of a geological explanation: these phenomena occur "when rocks under great stress release electromagnetic waves and radioactive gas which ionize air and thus produce light".

This is what Trujillano quotes in his report (4), where he also refers to the latest paradigm on earthquakes, based on Friedemann Freund's benchmark experiments (with Ames Research Center, NASA), studies which show that stress on igneous rocks convert mechanical energy into electric current.

We read in NASA's website that Freund's mechanism for turning rock stress into distant light and electrical activity extends to earthquake phenomena such as lights, infrared emissions detected from space, radio noise, large-scale disturbances in the upper atmosphere, and even animal behavior and human premonitions.(5)

Still, the question about UFO's won't go away. They could have been there, monitoring or watching over the fiery cries fom Pachamama. Peruvian UFO researcher Alex Sender (6) is set on finding out more about that angle of the story. He lives in Ica where he saw the blue lights.

Then he visited the hardest hit areas and gathered testimonies about the lights. He says that during previous earthquakes, hardly anybody mentioned witnessing any such phenomena, but now everybody is talking about it.

He will be publishing his report shortly. And we will be telling you about his findings, for sure.

Sandra Rodríguez-Beauchamp