The day when Spaniards mistook a polar aurora for the Apocalypse
‘The sky is burning, it’s the end of the world,’ shouted some. ‘Where is the fire?’ asked others. ‘Hitler is testing against us his death ray,’ was heard. These are some of the phrases, collected from some Spanish newspapers, that could be heard on the night of January 25, 1938 in Spain and all over the world. The reason: the sky had lit up with an intense red color. It was a color that, although many did not know it, belonged to a beautiful polar aurora and not to the Apocalypse.
When the coronavirus arrived in Europe, panic quickly spread. And this is a society that is constantly connected. Social networks, television, press, radio… It is even difficult not to find out what is happening minute by minute. However, in the 20th century, many of these media did not exist. Sometimes you had to wait until the day after an event to find out about it. This created confusion and the most impossibile conspiracy theories.
That is what happened on January 25, 1938. A red color had suddenly emerged from the skies. In Spain, the Civil War had already claimed thousands of dead. In Europe, the situation was unstable and the fear of a second world war was growing. In this situation, together with a meteorological phenomenon that the great majority of Spaniards had never seen before, it was easy for people to make a multitude of conjectures.
A red aurora borealis in the skies over Germany | Shutterstock
Suddenly, at eight o’clock in the evening, northern lights appeared in the peninsular skies. Many Spaniards thought it was a divine punishment derived from the massacres of the war. Others believed that the red color was related to the blood of all the victims of the war. Meanwhile, some saw in that natural spectacle the flames of an immense fire. There were also those who saw in those lights a clear sign of the Apocalypse.
Thus, each family and each place experienced that event in its own way. In the villages of Granada, for example, many families ran to the countryside, scared. ‘My father remembers that my grandmother did not stop crying for several weeks, until she received a letter from her two soldier sons from the Guadalajara front,’ narrates Gabriel Pozo in an article in the Granada Independent. ‘The blood she saw in the sky was not theirs. He never understood that it was an aurora borealis,’ he adds.
In the front of Teruel, a city that had just been recovered from the hands of the Republican army, both sides believed that the glow of that sky was caused by a unknown weapon until the moment. A weapon that was not in their hands, but in those of their opponent. From Madrid, as described by the ABC newspaper, it was thought that the mountains of El Pardo were burning with virulence. In Barcelona the morale of the troops was seriously affected by those reddish flares.
Red polar aurora over Alaskan skies | Shutterstock
The testimonies followed one after the other, each one more apocalyptic than the last. One of the theories that circulated in those days was the one of the prophecy of the Virgin of Fatima, especially among the most believers. This prophecy said: ‘When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given to you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, hunger…’. For some, the occurrence of that phenomenon, together with the outbreak of World War II, could only mean one thing: the prophecy of the virgin was true.
That sky had, however, a completely rational explanation. It was a polar aurora, called aurora borealis if they occur in the northern hemisphere and aurora australis if they occur in the southern hemisphere. Auroras are formed when a stream of electrically charged particles emitted by the sun reaches the Earth. When these particles come into contact with the planet they collide with the atoms and molecules of the atmosphere following the lines of the Earth’s magnetic field, so they enter through the poles.
Without going into too much detail, it is this collision that emits a light visible to humans in shades of green, purple, blue, yellow or even, as in this case, red. When the sun emits more particles than usual, a geomagnetic storm is produced that makes it possible to see the northern lights in other points of the planet closer to the equator.
This phenomenon occurs in the world, more or less, a couple of times every hundred years. 1706, 1870, 2000 or 2003 are some of the dates in which the northern lights have decided to come down to pay a pleasant visit to more southern latitudes. The Carrington phenomenon stands out, when, in 1859, the auroras were seen in Havana. The auroras of 1938 and 1859 are, for now, the most virulent geomagnetic storms in recorded history. More than an Apocalypse or a doomsday weapon, a spectacle to behold. Although when people who have known each other all their lives are being killed, it is normal to interpret it in the most extreme way.
