LUMINOUS WITH PROMISE

ALMOST 12 YEARS AGO , the British merchant vessel S.S. Lima was cruising under a clear night sky along a southwesterly course in the Indian Ocean about 150 miles off the coast of Somalia. "A whitish glow was observed on the horizon," a crew member later reported. "After 15 minutes of steaming, the ship was completely surrounded by a sea of milky white color with a fairly uniform luminescence.... It appeared as though the ship was sailing over a field of snow or gliding over clouds." Overhead, in the dark silence of space, a U.S. Department of Defense meteorological mapping satellite was zooming by, looking down with an uncommonly sensitive light detector. A decade later, with the "milky sea" report from the Lima as the clue, bioluminescence researchers retrieved the satellite's archived imagery. In images captured on Jan. 25-27, 1995, Steven H. D. Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Steven D. Miller of the ...