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Last night over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere South of the Russian peninsula Kamchatka I experienced the creepiest thing so far in my flying career.
After about 5 hours in flight we left Japan long time behind us and were cruising at a comfortable 34.000ft with about 4,5 hours to go towards Alaska.
We heard via the radio about earthquakes in Iceland, Chile and San Francisco, and since there were a few volcanos on our route that might or might not be going off during our flight, we double checked with dispatch if there was any new activity on our route after we departed from Hongkong.
Then, very far in the distance ahead of us, just over the horizon an intense lightflash shot up from the ground. It looked like a lightning bolt, but way more intense and directed vertically up in the air. I have never seen anything like this, and there were no flashes before or after this single explosion of light.
Since there were no thunderstorms on our route or weather-radar, we kept a close lookout for possible storms that might be hiding from our radar and might cause some problems later on.

I decided to try and take some pictures of the night sky and the strange green glow that was all over the Northern Hemisphere. I think it was sort of a Northern Lights but it was much more dispersed, never seen anything like this before either. About 20 minutes later in flight I noticed a deep red/orange glow appearing ahead of us, and this was a bit strange since there was supposed to be nothing but endless ocean below us for hundreds of miles around us. A distant city or group of typical Asian squid-fishing-boats would not make sense in this area, apart from the fact that the lights we saw were much larger in size and glowed red/orange, instead of the normal yellow and white that cities or ships would produce.
The closer we got, the more intense the glow became, illuminating the clouds and sky below us in a scary orange glow. In a part of the world where there was supposed to be nothing but water.
The only cause of this red glow that we could think of, was the explosion of a huge volcano just underneath the surface of the ocean, about 30 minutes before we overflew that exact position.
Since the nearest possible airport was at least 2 hours flying away, and the idea of flying into a highly dangerous and invisible ash-plume in the middle of the night over the vast Pacific Ocean we felt not exactly happy. Fortunately we did not encounter anything like this, but together with the very creepy unexplainable deep red/orange glow from the ocean's surface, we felt everything but comfortable. There was also no other traffic near our position or on the same routing to confirm anything of what we saw or confirm any type of ash clouds encountered.

We reported our observations to Air Traffic Control and an investigation into what happened in this remote region of the ocean is now started.

Two photos included, hardly edited except for watermark and resize. Note that photos are taken with extremely high ISO (sensor sensitivity) so quality might be a bit poor. Also an overview of our route + marking of the location is included.

Now I'm just hoping that if a new island has been formed there, at least it can be named after me as the official discoverer. :)
That would be pretty cool!

UPDATE: Added 4 new photos and google-earth map with underwater geography
One of the photos shows our landing lights illuminating the sky ahead since we were afraid we might be encountering an ashcloud. We entered a thin layer of clouds 5 minutes after passing the red glow, but no ash was detected or encountered.

UPDATE (Aug 31st):
I've created a little list with all the different scenarios and theories that have been suggested and that are being researched at this moment.
To improve readability of this page, I've included the list in the comments below.


UPDATE (Oct 23rd)
3 weeks after the sighting (September 19th), I flew Hongkong-Anchorage again and I've included one of the NOTAMS for that flight, and a copy of the navigation chart that we used that day.
The NOTAM was issued by the Russian authorities stating a Military Rocket test. The area is put on the chart and the red line is the route we flew on August 24th. As you can see, the route/sighting is pretty close to Russian Navy test waters


UPDATE (Nov 2nd) =
Received very interesting emails and information from Russian Kamchatka based scientists from the 'Distant school of Cosmic Meteo Tectonics'; http://cosmetecor.org/ that have investigated my sighting too.
They suspect this might have something to do with so called 'earthquake lights' because of a strong electromagnetic interaction between the earths core and atmosphere.
Quote;
"Similar phenomenon you’ve recently observed was being detected in winter 2002-03 in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. There were carried out field research by our collective on day-by-day basis near Petropavlovsk. There was nothing abnormal to expect. But one day, on Friday, anomalous increasing of amplitude of the subterranean electric signals (in 5-10 times) was observed. When sun went down (~18:00 local time) and it became dark, the sky was reddish with shades of green. The phenomenon resembled with aurora, but Petropavlovsk is in latitude 53° North. The tops of hometown volcanoes were burning with red. Townsfolk began to call to emergency service, officials. Town was full of rumors in the same manner as your post. Thanks to the unique SE-technique we knew what was happened.
I’d like to point your attention that the brightest line of radiation of hydrogen atom (H-alpha -Нα) is a blood-red spectral line with a wavelength of 656.28 nanometers. The less bright line of radiation of hydrogen atom is H-beta, which has a cyan (blue-green) spectral line with a wavelength of 486 nanometers.
Here I’ve attached SE-signals measured at station no.2-IMFSET-Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy ~380 km from the observed phenomena. Abrupt step-down was detected on 2014/08/23 11:55UT and back on 2014/08/25 06:37UT.
Let me note that many decades military and civilian pilots have reported other spectacular phenomena seeing ephemeral flashes above storms, though these were mostly discounted by the atmosphere science community. The different kinds of flashes are called with fanciful names like sprites, elves, jets, trolls, gnomes, pixies and fairies. The first scientific documentation of brilliant mysterious glows (flashes) occurring between troposphere-ionosphere was captured on videotape on the night of July 06, in 1989 by Dr. J.Winckler. Who knows, maybe, your photos will play important role in future researching."