Lightning researchers in this film are tracking a class of electrical discharge that ordinary storm-chasers never see: bolts that fire upward from the tops of thunderclouds rather than down to the ground, some reaching 80 kilometers into the upper atmosphere and dwarfing normal lightning by up to a thousand times in scale. Scientists from the University of Florida Lightning Research Group and the University of Alaska Fairbanks explain how these upward discharges were caught on camera, using footage and archive images from NASA, Penn State, and Stanford alongside gliding-club and airline near-miss accounts. The film's central claim is unsettling: this lightning can carry six times the force commercial aircraft are built to withstand, and investigators here treat it as a possible factor in a string of unexplained air disasters. The most pointed piece of evidence is a photograph that reportedly triggered a confidential NASA inquiry into whether a high-altitude strike contributed to the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, a claim the film lays out but does not fully resolve.