Rare and exotic upside-down lightning might be quite mundane after all In the time it has taken me to write this, lightning has struck the earth over 500 times. It is one of the most spectacular, mesmerizing, and awe-inspiring natural phenomena. For all of its beauty and power, it still holds many mysteries. As recently as the 1990s, we had only anecdotal evidence of the majority of lightning’s many incarnations. At that time, thanks to videotape evidence from NASA’s Space Shuttle missions, actual observations of sprites, jets, and later ELVES (Emissions of Light and Very Low-Frequency Perturbations From Electromagnetic Pulse Sources) would all be confirmed and studied.