#9. Shedding a Little Light
- Barry Markovsky
- Nov 14
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 20
It happens a lot. I get an email or text, or I’m chatting with someone at a party or a group hike. They tell me about a supernatural experience they had, or an impossible coincidence they read about, or some unearthly thing that happened to a friend of a friend’s niece. Is it good that when these folks encounter something weird, they think of me? I’m not sure, but I like that they trust me to listen without mocking. And often I can even help make sense of whatever it was. Whatever the story, I’ve probably heard it before, or one very similar to it.
A few days ago my friend Craig sent me a link to an article in a local online newsletter. The title was “The Mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights.” They sounded a lot like other mystery lights I’d read about, such as those down in Marfa, Texas. But until Craig sent the article, I didn’t know we had our own mystery lights haunting the hills and hollers of Western North Carolina. Fun!
First, a little summary.
As skies darken, visitors gather year-round at viewing locations within sight of Brown Mountain Ridge, about fifteen miles north-northwest of the town of Morganton, NC. The Brown Mountain Overlook is the most popular spot, about six miles from the ridge as the crow flies.
Most nights, nothing happens. When it does, according to reports, lights appear on the side or top of the ridge, or more rarely, in the air above it. Sometimes the lights move, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they blink, sometimes not. Sometimes they’re white, and sometimes they’re red. They can be hard to identify, and even scientists who’ve investigated the lights admit they’re not always sure what they are.
The local newsletter article had a long subtitle ending with “…the Fleeting Orbs of Light Still Remain Unexplainable Occurrences”. Even if I knew nothing about the lights, I’d think that's an incredibly bold statement. “Unexplainable”? How could the journalist possibly know we’re incapable of ever explaining the lights? Especially when it turns out the vast majority of the lights are easily explained.
What’s Going On?
Something totally unfamiliar may look inexplicable to an observer. Maybe that makes it a mystery to the observer, but it doesn’t mean it’s mysterious in any broader sense.
Observers of the Brown Mountain Lights (BMLs), including media reporters, aren’t necessarily aware of the likely sources of the lights or the results of past investigations. And most reporters are more interested in titillating their readers with mysteries than with facts. (Personally, I’m often titillated by facts—among some other things, of course.) However, to borrow the tagline from the old X Files TV series, the truth is out there. You only have to do a little excavating.
I’ve dug up four categories of explanation that help to demystify the mystery. Here are examples drawn from each.
Physics
A light has properties unique to its source. Different media, such as the tungsten filament in an incandescent bulb, phosphor in an LED, the wick of a kerosene lamp, or the hydrogen in a star, all have unique, identifiable profiles that can be measured with spectrometers. The Marfa lights in Texas mentioned earlier were analyzed, and they proved to be distant car headlights, sometimes distorted by atmospheric conditions.
Dr. Daniel Caton, Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of North Carolina/Asheville, told me that the BMLs’ spectra have yet to be analyzed, mainly due to logistical problems. But based on his field investigations and the availability of natural alternative explanations, I think a spectral analysis might be overkill.
Low-quality BML videos on YouTube often show small points of light dancing around against a black background. But the lack of reference points and an abundance of camera jitter make it impossible to glean anything from them beyond the fact that people saw something. The audio tracks are informative in some cases. You can hear observers’ excitement rise when they first see some lights, and then fall when they realize it’s only cars or trains in the distance.
Dr. Caton and his collaborators have studied the physical properties of the lights for years. One of their experiments tested whether handheld lanterns in the hills were visible from the distant viewing sites. They were. Campfires, too. These don’t prove what the lights were in particular instances. Still, they offer potent alternative explanations that don’t involve ghosts, aliens, or other woo-woo entities popular in the local folklore.
Caton also set up sensitive night-vision cameras to record the lights over time. Those recordings didn’t correlate with the reports of casual observers. Observers were likely making “false positive” errors, believing they saw things that weren't there.
Caton’s many hours of video footage revealed only a single event that he couldn’t easily identify: a light appearing low on the horizon for a short time and then disappearing. To me, it looked like a plane’s landing lights seen head-on, fading out when it banked into a different heading. Caton wasn’t so sure, nor was he willing to leap to any other conclusions. His investigation did reveal there are “all kinds of planes” flying in the area on any given night.
Dr. Caton’s bottom line: Recordable events at Brown Mountain are rare, and only a small subset of them lack simple explanations. The small residual isn’t due to supernatural forces but to circumstances that hinder gathering sufficient data.
Physiology
Between the physical world of objects and our awareness of them, our eyes and brains handle every bit of visual information that crosses our corneas. Usually, it’s good we're unaware of this process. Otherwise, we might have to question everything we see.
Our eyes and our brains evolved for survival, not necessarily to accurately interpret rare, non-threatening events. Several aspects of eye physiology actually impede vision under less-than-ideal conditions. For example, we rapidly lose acuity as the lights dim because there are fewer light-sensitive rod cells in our retinas near the center of our fields of vision. Second, our eyes jiggle unconsciously when we strain to focus on ambiguous sources, creating false sensations of movement. Further, our retinas pre-process nerve signals, filtering out information that isn’t normally useful but might have been invaluable in unusual circumstances. These and other factors literally alter visual signals before we become aware of them.
The brain does vastly more signal processing than the eyes. Several waystations intercept, sort, and reduce impulses streaming in from the optic nerves. Various parts of the brain associate the resulting signals with pre-formed patterns, memories, and sensations. To make sense of ambiguous lights, the brain may shape-shift them into something more recognizable, reality be damned.
Perception
Let’s define “perception” as experiencing information received through the senses. It’s where visual processing meets conscious awareness. But as we’ve seen, a lot happens in the eyes and the brain before we become visually aware. Literally everything we perceive is a reconstruction of partial data, with our experience incorporating all sorts of unconscious distortions and misjudgments. The more ambiguous the viewing context, the more likely it will be misperceived.
The BMLs are ambiguous by definition. When a light gets identified as a car, it’s no longer a BML. Logically, that means BMLs is a residual category for those lights which, from one or more perceivers' points of view, haven't been identified. And that’s all they are. They may have a very simple explanation, but one that observers are unaware of.
Caton said as much regarding the BMLs. Most people who go out at night and look at the sky don’t really know what they’re seeing a lot of the time. Their inexperience with nighttime observing makes it hard to discern Venus from a motorcycle headlamp, or a nearby firefly from a distant shooting star. Lacking experience viewing distant car headlights, campfires, flashlights, or aerial objects at night, and not understanding how atmospheric conditions introduce distortion, most people would find it difficult to interpret their movements and nature. But that doesn’t stop their brains from trying.
People
When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’re a social psychologist, you see social influence everywhere. BMLs included.
Sometimes the audio tracks in BML videos pick up chatter among the observers. You can tell when they’re in a state of heightened readiness. The moment any one of them thinks they see something flicker against the dark background, they become overtly emotional and vocal. “Look! Look! See that?!” ("Oh, never mind. It's only a damn firefly.")
In group settings, such responses can trigger a chain reaction. Everyone else there gets excited, too. Bearing in mind that elevated emotions cloud judgments, we have a recipe for socially induced misperceptions.
A similar effect occurs when people share their BML experiences with others who weren’t there. The excitement is infectious and, like the proverbial “big fish” story, things get exaggerated in the retelling.
When the story reaches a critical mass of public awareness, like nuclear fission, it becomes self-propagating. (A physics analogy for Dr. Caton!) Word of mouth, social media, and news media keep the story alive and elevate it to the status of folklore and “local legend.” Fortunately, I don’t think this is one of those things where misperception and misjudgment can harm us. It’s just good clean fun. And as long as there are enough people who are intrigued by their own inability to interpret the BMLs properly, there will be other people who are delighted to fill in the blanks for them.
It’s not a mystery how something becomes a mystery.
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