A childhood belief about weather

I grew up in a very rural area, so tornados were a very common thing when I was younger. In the evening, from my parents home we could see the lights in the city when it got dark outside. There was a huge car lot in the city and it had the huge lights that would
circle into the sky forming a tornado shape, so it could get peoples attention. It definitely got my attention just about every night when I would run inside my house to tell my parents a tornado was coming. At first I had them running to the windows to look outside but eventually they drove me past my " tornado " one night and proved to me, it was only lights in the sky.