Let the force be with you.

[xelasnave]

I have often wondered about lightening and more so lately with the observation of sprites (short lived electrical "discharges" above clouds. 
Is there anyone else interested in these events? 
I was talking to a friend who has some interesting ether notions who tells me excitedly "sprites prove there is an ether" but I cant really follow his explainations. 
How could an ether be proved because of these sprites? 
Moreover how could an ether be responsible for any forces other than gravity if indeed it is a feature of gravity as favoured by Schmelzer. 
Alex

[Schmelzer]

The idea that some sprites prove there is an ether is almost certainly nonsense.  (Already for the simple reason that it is completely implausible that standard physics has a problem to explain them. In principle, it would be possible that standard physics has a problem with them, but I have never heard about such an open problem.)

Then, in my concept the ether is not only responsible for gravity, but for everything.  The idea behind this is simple: Something which moves with the speed of sound of some medium is a wave of this medium.  Massive fields do not seem to fit, but from a mathematical point of view they look like fields which move with the speed of light (the equation for the massless variant of the equation) combined with some local reaction term (the mass term) which, then, effectively slows down the wave.  So it is only a slowed down wave which, basically, also moves with the speed of light.