When thrust into Earth’s orbit for an extended stay in space, astronauts don’t just experience an array of physical changes – space travel can have many mind-altering effects on a person, and frequent hallucinations are unnervingly common.

So imagine what it would feel like to be floating 400 km (250 miles) above the surface of our planet, staring into the void of space, and for a split second, you thought you saw an unexplained flash of bright blue light, or vast branches of what looks like upside-down lightning piercing the darkness.

In the early Apollo missions, astronauts kept seeing regular flashes or streaks of light in space that were gone as quickly as they appeared.

Even as recently as 2012, astronaut Don Pettit described these experiences as “flashes in my eyes, like luminous dancing fairies” that would appear “in the dark confines of my sleep station, with the…