Red/Orange "Pillar of Light" UAP -- oil refinery stack flares

[JMartJr]

Reports from the Houston area today are stirring up UFO talk on various discussion/image boards about orange pillars of light, claimed to be some sort of energy weapon, or alien something or other, or demon/angel manifestation. Media reports are playing up the "mysterious mystery!!!" angel only slightly, and most are including the actual explanation:

Reports of the light came in from Galveston County to Montgomery County to Jefferson County where Beaumont is located. While it is not currently known for sure the cause of the light that lit up social media, ExxonMobil in Beaumont posted on Facebook this afternoon that flaring would be occurring at its facility. Some are guessing that a reflection from the flaring either in Beaumont or at another site closer to Houston caused the orange streak.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/...d-in-the-sky-over-houston-area-pictures-here/
Photos at that site of the Houston event are copyrighted, so I will not copy them here.

Similar photos floating around the UFO-based discussions show similar flaring events from Edmonton, Canada, in 2019...

...and, I believe, in Syria (others say Egypt, their memory may be better than mine.)

It is my understanding that this is caused by burning off deposits inside stacks at oil refineries, and is referred to as a "deep stack flare," but somebody with a better grasp of oil refinery terminology than I have feel free to correct that.

"Project blue beam was too well known, so they switched to orange beam," is a more amusing explanation, but oil refinery flares is the correct one.

 

[Mick West]

That's a light pillar from a bright light behind the horizon and ice crystals in the air. Examples:

Given it's a single pillar, then a refinery flare might be possible if it's the only bright light around.

 

[Mick West]

Photos at that site of the Houston event are copyrighted, so I will not copy them here.

All photos are copyrighted. You can post them here under fair use. Non-commercial investigation/education

The earlier event in Edmonton shows the flare at the refinery under the pillar.

So it's not really mysterious, just one of those recurring, somewhat-rare, interesting things that is new to someone.

 

[JMartJr]

I'm going to respectfully disagree on the beyond the horizon" bit in Mick's first post, as the pics in the following post show the refinery clearly this side of the horizon. I don't think ice crystal's are necessarily involved in stack flare "light pillars," which may need (and may have) another name if that one is specific to the ice crystal phenomenon.

My understanding is that you have a bright fire inside the stack intentionally burning off gunk that has accumulated inside, creating a searchlight effect of light shining up from the stack. Where this intersects clouds, dust, smoke from the refinery, etc. you get the orange column illuminated over the stack. Hence, you wouldn't get ice-based pillars over the other lights at or near the refinery... just over the stack.

Again, somebody who knows the refinery biz better than I do feel free to correct me if I've gotten it wrong.

 

[Mick West]

I'm going to respectfully disagree on the beyond the horizon" bit in Mick's first post, as the pics in the following post show the refinery clearly this side of the horizon.

"Horizon" here is just whatever is obscuring things that are far away, not the WGS-84 ocean horizon. Sorry I wasn't clear.

My understanding is that you have a bright fire inside the stack intentionally burning off gunk that has accumulated inside, creating a searchlight effect of light shining up from the stack.

No, I don't think that's a thing, flaring is done in the open air. Here's edmonton one:

You see it's producing considerably more light that anything else, so it's the only thing that shows up as a light pillar.

Here's the Beaumont flare, similarly.

 

[Ravi]

I'm going to respectfully disagree on the beyond the horizon" bit in Mick's first post, as the pics in the following post show the refinery clearly this side of the horizon. I don't think ice crystal's are necessarily involved in stack flare "light pillars," which may need (and may have) another name if that one is specific to the ice crystal phenomenon.

My understanding is that you have a bright fire inside the stack intentionally burning off gunk that has accumulated inside, creating a searchlight effect of light shining up from the stack. Where this intersects clouds, dust, smoke from the refinery, etc. you get the orange column illuminated over the stack. Hence, you wouldn't get ice-based pillars over the other lights at or near the refinery... just over the stack.

Again, somebody who knows the refinery biz better than I do feel free to correct me if I've gotten it wrong.

I am not sure what you mean.. Light pillars are caused by ice crystals, where their shape is leading to the effect seen. It does not matter if the object is obscured or not, as long as the angle between source-observer is just right. Here is a nice link about atmospheric optical phenomena: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/lpil.htm

 

[JMartJr]

My use of "light pillars" may have been unfortunate. Please do not construe from that that I mean the ice crystal and light phenomenon of the same name. My use of the term was descriptive, not technical. That's unfortunate, but hard to undo at this point!

No, I don't think that's a thing, flaring is done in the open air.

Usual flaring, burning off waste gases as they are produced, is indeed done in the open air. And is continuous. My understanding is that there is also this other thing, burning what is basically tar deposits out of the stack, from time to time as needed. Sadly, my source for that is lost in time, as the last time I looked into it and read this was 4-5 years ago, when an earlier example in one of the Gulf States was producing UFO chatter. I will devote some time to trying to re-acquire a source on that.

In any event, I think we're all comfortable saying columns of orange light associated with oil refineries are not aliens, energy weapons tests, or demons. They are the product of one or another processes of burning off waste products of oil refining, producing a bright orange light that sometimes shows up as a column of orange light in the sky.

 

[JMartJr]

And now the part where I eat a slice of that old humble pie. The Houston incident and some others WERE caused by flaring at a refinery, but by the method Mick and Ravi assert above. After searching as thoroughly as time permits, I can no longer locate a source to back up my explanation of the phenomenon, fires burning off deposits inside the stack at a refinery. But I did learn that it is almost impossible for what I described to happen in a refinery flare stack, as they tend to have internal baffles near the top of the stack to prevent flashback, so even if there WAS a fire in the stack, intentional or otherwise, it would not do what I described.

Image from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare#/media/File:FlareStack_System.png

As to my source, since I can no longer locate it it is hard to be sure, but it seems likely that either:
It was totally wrong (which may be why it is no longer findable!)
It was right for the incident in question at that time but was describing some other sort of stack than what a refinery would use and I remembered that bit wrong.
Or, given how many times I have gently chided folks for not accepting that their memories might be faulty (in debating the Mandela Effect) it would be disingenuous of me to not admit that I'm as liable to that as anybody. I remember distinctly finding the source that explained all that -- but memories are often incorrect.

Lesson for self: don't rely on old memories for a post on MB, go find the sources again, THEN post.
One of the things I like about this place is that when you are wrong, it is usually pointed out without a lot of derision, but it is pointed out. That's a good thing!

Anyway, I have come around to the ice-crystals/light pillar way of thinking, caused in these instances by the light of a refinery flaring happening to coincide with the right sort of ice crystals in the atmosphere. Apologies for so confidently asserting something that turned out to be incorrect.