Green Flash off Santa Cruz

Green Flash is a very common optical phenomena off the coast here.  It works basically like a rainbow works, the atmosphere splits the light into it's distinct colors and the green wavelength is the main one here.  Just as the sun sinks below the horizon, there’s a distinct green flash or ray that shoots out (you can photograph it).  This phenomena was highlighted in a recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie as a polar phenomena…well, that’s where the cool legends begin…  

Admiral Richard E. Byrd, medal of honor winner, first man to reach both the north and south pole by air, commander of five, count ‘em, five missions of the US Navy to that super useful not-at-all-difficult to hold a base on centrally-located winter wonderland, Antarctica.  On one of these missions he took along 4000 people, you know, just in case, with like fifteen ships and a whole air wing.  Later, he also established all the US permanent bases in Antarctica.  Well…allegedly… while on one of his flights, Byrd claimed to see a green flash while he was over the poles that lasted off and on for 35 minutes.  No big deal, other polar explorers have seen similar things subsequently.  But the ‘allegedly’ is very firmly asserted.  If you google the incident, you’ll get pages and pages of people debunking the incident. Byrd makes some folks nervous.  For you see, Byrd is tied to a series of terrific legends about flying his airplane into the interior of the hollow earth, meeting with people who lived there that gave him an ultimatum over nuclear weapons, leading a task force to Antarctica to fight aliens who had decided to shelter fleeing Nazis, seeing a wooly mammoth, demanding that the US be prepared to fight flying saucers, and much, much more.  He was involuntarily committed to a mental ward shortly after returning from his last expedition to Antarctica, the one where the US Government trusted him to organize the establishment of all their permanent bases there.  Afterwards, he died.  The end.  But, this guy racked up some serious points here: Hollow earth wooly space alien nazi mammoths.  Deviant art, why can’t we give people hollow earth wooly space alien nazi mammoths?  This is just wrong.  

Anyways, that’s why Disney Pirates associated the green flash with the poles and other worlds and that weird dead Jack Sparrow crabs sequence.   And now you know…the rest of the story.

Admiral Byrd is probably alive and well and living on Eynhallow.  Because.