Whatever these are they are certainly challenging. We have an
excellent picture here for once. It is a ninety second exposure. We
also have some more observations. A report of a miasma with light
effects is not ball lighting but does conform to my description of a
slime mold forming a large methane holding envelope. Once such a
balloon reaches sunlight at high elevations the lighting effect must
also improve.
A night time event would at best describe a miasma or what has been
described as swamp gas particularly since it is luminescent.
I actually think we are on to something here. This is also an
explanation for fairy lights.
The reaction in direct sunlight is noteworthy and I would also expect
that the beach ball will also expand. Any improvement in
luminescence would then become visible at a distance.
The movement is an artifact of strong wind currents up there.
Brown Mountain
lights still enchanting
Swamp gas? Ball
lightning? Optical illusion? Brown Mountain Lights puzzle
By Mark Washburn
Posted: Saturday,
Nov. 03, 2012
MORGANTON No one knows
the answer to the mountain’s mystery, including C.W. Smith, who has
probably spent as much time around fabled Brown Mountain as anyone
alive.
Smith, 67, spent 33
years with the U.S. Forest Service, patrolling the Pisgah National
Forest as a federal law enforcement agent beginning in 1966.
He knows every fold of
the ridge and is familiar with its marquee mystery, the so-called
Brown Mountain Lights.
He grew up in nearby
McDowell County in western North Carolina and never much believed the
stories about nocturnal flickerings. Then while working one night, he
caught sight of what looked like a bonfire on the mountain, but in a
place where there were no trails.
“It started going up
the mountain, too fast for someone to be using mountain-climbing
equipment. It went up to the ridge line and disappeared.”
With that, Smith
became a believer, he told a symposium on the phenomenon held
Saturday at Morganton Municipal Auditorium.
“If you ever see
them, you’ll never forget it because you’ve never seen anything
like it before.”
Lights long-lived
Brown Mountain, a
rugged lump in the wrinkles of the Blue Ridge, has attracted
attention since antiquity because of the lights.
Folklore holds that
Cherokee Indians thought they were torches held by ghosts of grieving
maidens. An early European explorer, a German surveyor named G.W. de
Brahm, studied the mountain in 1771 and concluded it vented “nitrous
vapors which are borne by the wind.”
Other theories have
been floated through the years.
In February 1913, the
Observer ran through a few, including dust vented from a mica mine,
then added: “Quite a few suspect that some moonshiner, who likes
not the limelight, is sending up the light on a kite to frighten his
neighbors and others out of that immediate vicinity.”
A U.S. Geologic Survey
later that year concluded people were observing refracted lamps from
locomotives on the Southern Railway. Then came the Great Flood of
1916, which washed away tracks and the theory. Trains didn’t run
for a spell, but the lights stayed on the job.
A 1916 study concluded
the glow was the result of “sulfurated hydrogen vapors” –
better known as swamp gas.
In 1922, another
geologist spent a week in the mountains and declared the lights were
nothing more than auto headlights, train lamps and optical illusions.
Fred May, editor of the Lenoir News-Topic, called it shoddy science.
“Weather conditions
were such that he had only two cloudless and fogless nights during
the week he was here making observations,” May reported.
Ball lightning theory
Dan Caton, a physics
and astronomy professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, is
one of the foremost academic researchers of the lights.
He believes most
sightings are bogus – people are seeing campfires, headlights,
aircraft, even the lights of distant Lenoir. Caton, who spoke at
another symposium on the lights in February, estimates that maybe 5
percent of reports are legitimate.
He favors a theory
that the lights are ball lighting, a little-understood but
long-observed phenomenon.
He has interviewed
people who describe misty or fireworks-like miasma about as big as
a beach ball floating up the mountainside, a good account of ball
lightning. Why it occurs with regularity in the Linville Gorge, he
said, needs to be further explored.
Caton and a team from
the university are setting up a camera pointed toward Brown Mountain
that will feed to the website brownmountainlights.org and should be
in operation by month’s end.
Photographic evidence
One of the best
pictures taken of the lights was displayed at the symposium by
Charles Braswell Jr., a Taylorsville professional photographer whose
work is familiar to readers of the Our State magazine.
In 2001, he shot a
video of lights rising above the north ridge mountain, then opened
the shutter of his camera for a 90-second time-lapse exposure. On the
video, the light flared and ebbed, then crept to left, paused and
drifted to the right.
On his film, it left a
streak painting its path, which Braswell estimated was 3 miles long.
He said Brown Mountain
is full of deception. People think they’re spying the mystery, but
really only looking at campfires, mountain bikes or off-road
vehicles.
“They’re
unmistakable if you know what you’re looking for,” Braswell said.
“There’s only one way to see the lights, and that is to spend a
lot of time looking.”
A close encounter
On one still autumn
night, Les Burril had a close encounter.
“Something just
illuminated a few feet away,” said Burril, a career Forest Service
officer who worked six years in the Pisgah.
“It looked like a
candle. ... It continued to brighten for a few seconds and just sat
there. Another one lit up a little farther away. I probably stood
there eight or 10 minutes and watched. It moved down, smaller and
smaller, then blinked out.”
Burril, assigned to
hunt poachers and vandals, said he never thought much about the
silent apparitions on his beat.
“We weren’t paid
to look for the Brown Mountain Lights. I always looked at it as some
kind of physical phenomenon. I wasn’t worried about them. Now, a
guy who might rise up out of a bush under the light, yes.”
Burril, 56, retired
and living in Georgia, said he has no idea what they are.
“There are guys a
lot brighter than me who have tried to figure it out, and I didn’t
even try.”
He’s not alone. No
one knows the answer to the mountain’s mystery.
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