“Mystery surrounds ‘strange’ flash of electric blue light in skies above Stoke-on-Trent”…

“It was a green-turquoise flash. The lights in the house flickered”.

Yes, I noticed that too, a bit further down the valley at Etruria. Sometimes there’s the flash of an ambulance going past on the distant road, but it wasn’t like that, it was higher in the sky and more diffuse, a different colour, and not with such a regular pulse.

There was a possibly related phenomenon in 1896…

“The Earthquake of December 1896”: the North Staffordshire Naturalists’ Field Club, Annual Report and Transactions, 1897 offered a collation of reports from all around the district of the “earth-wave”. “Dr. McAldowie estimated that about two-thirds of the adult inhabitants of Stoke were roused [in their beds] by the shock.” Also reports of atmospheric disturbances, flashes of light like lightning. The Revd. G. T. Ryves was investigating the strange local reports of ‘lightning’, but he died before his investigations could be completed. A national report on the “luminous phenomena” was published by another researcher in the Meteorological Magazine, and a summary list is given of the observed phenomena noted in the article: at Bridgenorth the “streets seemed to be on fire”. A large collation of press notices of the earthquake is given, drawn from further afield.