Soviet-era Tesla Tower restarted with spectacular lightning bolts

[MattSh]

(It's actually a Marx Generator, which they explain at the link below).

A massive Soviet-built generator – once used for testing the resistance of aircraft to lightning, but now largely mothballed due to prohibitive costs – has staged a striking demonstration test at the behest of RT.

The 6-Megavolt device, one of the most powerful in the world, is capable of generating 200 meter-long lightning bolts, and was constructed in the 1970s at a closed facility outside Moscow, but fell into disuse after the collapse of the USSR.

The futuristic complex of entangled metal coils hidden in a secured virgin forest made it a cult object for urban explorers. Teams of camera-equipped youths navigated their way and documented the rusting coils and huge locks on their blogs.

But what many of them didn’t understand is why their hair began to stand up as they got closer to the mysterious object, and were even more stunned seconds later a blue lights began to strike meters away. Facility chief Vladimir Sysoev says that many were seconds from death, and that it is by pure luck that no one has died during a test.

READ MORE http://on.rt.com/537bbe