Isolated Silent Lightning Storm...what is it?

Question

I went outside to get my cats and kept seeing flashes of light kind of like a strobe light...thinking my eyes were wacked out because of the street lamp i asked my sister to come look...we walked out a little ways and behind the trees was a pretty big cloud with lightning shooting through it...dead silent lightning...it was shooting up from the ground, down from the sky and horizontally as well...and it was different colors too...i saw blue yellow red and green and sometimes it looked like a rainbow...i thought maybe heat lightning but cant really find much on it...is it heat lightning or some other type of lightning...i know it wasnt too far away for me to hear because the cloud was almost about our house...so can anyone help?

Answer 1

If the storm is far enough away, you will not hear thunder. Some people call it "heat lightning". What you're seeing is probably cloud to cloud lightning, and it's a LOONG way off.