I wonder how often these occur. When I was in my early 20s a buddy and I were about 18 hours in to a drive to Buena Vista, CO from Portland, OR, when a transformer exploded somewhere near us in a huge canyon. We thought it was noiseless nucleur explosion - the light was searingly bright and seemed to engulf everything. I just happened to call another friend (from a pay phone!) who had experienced the same thing. Even…
I was driving at night and suddenly my heart jumped as a helicopter suddenly shined its bright spotlight straight at my car, like in the movies. It was hovering 20 feet off the ground about 200 feet away, and pointing straight at me.
After a second or two I realised the ‘helicopter’ was just my brain’s initial attempt to interpret what I was seeing. There was no helicopter, it was a transformer at the top of a pole that exploded.
The “spotlight” was not focused in any one direction but shining in all directions equally, so it was damn bright.
You hardly ever see anything so bright, which was why the “spotlight” thing made sense to my brain at first. And “helicopter” since it was up in the air.
It stayed lit for only a couple seconds and then the street plunged into darkness, all street lights off, as a few errant will-o-wisps sputtered out of the remains of the transformer.