The Brown Mountain Lights
Transcript ▾
Hi, I'm Dan Caton. I'm an astronomer and astrophysicist at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and I've been working on the Brown Mountain Lights for many years. I had a file on the lights ever since I moved here in 1981, but I didn't do anything about it until I had a student in my introductory astronomy course, and he claimed he had seen the lights and he had videoed them, and we went out during the daytime, got the lay of the land, and then I started going out there at night looking for them.
I didn't know what to think about them before I really started getting into it, but we shouldn't just poo-poo these claims of paranormal, but they deserve investigation, and so I felt maybe some interesting physics going on here that we don't know about. I'd gotten pessimistic about the lights and even cynical about their existence. We had been out a couple dozen times and hadn't really seen anything, and then I did an interview for an Associated Press reporter, and I got a lot of emails from people who claimed having seen the lights, and some people described seeing them not a thousand feet across at the Linville Gorge, but 20 feet across the parking lot, and so I got into the game.
I gave a presentation at a Brown Mountain Lights symposium, and there I met a couple of other people who were serious and interested, and so we formed a team, and we put the first camera there, and then we added a second camera, because if you see something, if it's not on both cameras, then it's an artifact, and the camera. We had recorded videos for several years, four to five years, every night, seeing really nothing until we saw this. The next morning, when I built this video and watched it, I looked at this and said, whoa, what is that?
This video stood out, and then it had something that was obviously different. Previous videos had had little glitches and lights and spots that I couldn't really make any sense of, but we had a light here that persisted over 20 minutes, came and went, had no lateral motion sideways, had no up-down motion. These are 30-second exposures, so if it were a meter, you would see little streaks, and so it was not something that was stellar.
A week before this video, I had talked to a reporter at the Charlotte Observer and told him, you know, I think the lights are gone. We haven't seen anything, and then, wow, bang, this thing pops up, and then I had to call him up and say, I think we need to reconsider that, and he wrote a new story that ran in the Charlotte Observer. I remain intrigued by the close-up sightings that people continue to report, but they're extremely hard to study.
They're random. I mean, how do you study a random phenomena? It's almost impossible.
I want people to not give up on the lights. I think that people can still go look for them. There's something interesting.
There's something we don't understand, but I do advise them before they go to familiarize themselves with the nightscape. I think that 85 to 90 percent of the claimed sightings are natural and man-made lights that are just unfamiliar to people at night, but there's a 5 to 10 percent that are interesting and odd and not easily explained.
