Following Morocco’s devastating earthquake last week, videos emerged online of what appeared to be mysterious lights in the sky before the tremor hit.
Blue lights in the sky can be seen flashing above Agadir at the foot of the Atlas Mountains in just hours before Morocco’s 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck.
The sightings have baffled onlookers.
“The [Morocco] earthquake happened at nighttime,” geophysicist Dr Friedemann Freund told The Washington Post.
“The condition for earthquake lights to be seen by people and maybe even recorded by cameras would be relatively high,” he said.
Watch
The unusual lights are thought to occur amid the changes to Earth’s magnetic field, like during an earthquake.
Lights were reported to have appeared before Italy’s historic city of L’Aquila just seconds before an earthquake struck in 2009.
Lights also appeared along the sky near the St. Lawrence River in Quebec in 1988, 11 days before a powerful quake.
As the Daily Mail reported, Geologists said the 6.8 magnitude tremor was the biggest quake to hit the heart of the country in more than 120 years and the deadliest in six decades.
Aljazeer reported that almost 3,000 people are said to have died in the earthquake that hit Morocco on Friday, but the death toll continues to rise as search and rescue teams comb through mountains of rubble.
Hopes of finding survivors are fading, given that blocked roads impede access to the worst-hit areas in remote villages in rural, mountainous regions.
Morocco is now well past the 72-hour window when rescues are considered most likely, yet survivors are sometimes found well beyond that period.
The death toll currently stands at 2,901, Morocco’s Ministry of the Interior said on Wednesday, and 5,530 have been injured in the country’s deadliest earthquake since 1960 and the most powerful since 1900.
Vehicles packed with supplies were inching up winding mountain roads to deliver desperately needed food and tents to survivors. Search teams were in places still scouring the rubble for the living.
READ: Virgin Mary Statue Only Effigy to Survive Cathedral Collapse during Earthquake in Turkey
