Recently, I learned Rob Lowe has been bothered by that speech for years, as people have taken it to mean his character was saying the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s Fire did not exist.
And then near the bottom of many more references, it states: In St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), Rob Lowe’s character erroneously claims that the phenomenon is “not even a real thing.”
When I heard that, I became momentarily incensed and went to Wikipedia to reassure myself we had gotten things right.
There, after a lengthy explanation of the weather phenomenon, the entry talks about how St. Elmo’s Fire has been alluded to from Julius Caesar to Charles Darwin and has appeared in literature from Melville’s Moby Dick to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.