July 9th and 10th

[eel_grass]

Just outside of Tromsø, Norway is a transmitting facility that is part of EISCAT, (European Incoherent Scatter), a multi-site research institute that studies the Sun’s effect on the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere. Any researchers can rent time at Tromsø provided they don’t mind their results being shared with all of the member nations and

Comments

[kutnitijna]

I am not entirely clear on whether TEQUILAsunrise actually projected electricity into the atmosphere, or just used the antenna as a receiver to measure extant charges. The HAARP experiment consisted of supercharging the atmosphere at 3.6MW, whereas EISCAT can only channel 1.2MW. According to your Naturenews article, the most EISCAT could do, if they were running a similar experiment, is make weak sparkles in the air. Imagining for a moment that they did have more power, though, it seems unlikely that the spiral could result from the same experiment: The HAARP "bullseye", which was irregularly shaped, was the result of pockets of partially-ionised gas being ignited into plasma. The spiral is too regular in shape for that to seem plausible.
...UNLESS... [Drumroll, please]
A malfunctioning Russian rocket spun out of control, leaving an ion-trail which happened to be ignited by a covert EISCAT experiment running at a significantly higher voltage than officially acknowledged, causing the EISCAT authorities to cover up their involvement. Ironically, if I wanted to destroy a missile, aiming a superpowered beam of energy at it would seem to be like a good way to do that. Perhaps the top-secret EISCAT ray both destroyed the rocket and plasmified its exhaust trail. In fact, EISCAT may be an ABM system masquerading as a research facility for alcoholic scientists.
OR
It could be a real-world form of the transmission system from the (Ironically Russian) book and two-part movie which inspired 'Avatar', 'The Inhabited Island'.