EARTH LIGHTS & UFOs
Excerpted from lecture script entitled "EARTH LIGHTS AND THE RE- INVENTION OF UFOLOGY" for presentation to the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) in 1997 (see also "Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Earth Lights" in Fortean Times 103, October 1997 - www.forteantimes.com
Few in mainstream ufology have paid much heed to the developing earth lights line of enquiry. Like Aesop's tortoise, earth lights research has passed other ufological hares either without them noticing or with them offering merely a dismissive swipe of a paw. Yet it can now attract significant funding and the interest of mainstream scientists, is provoking informed, cutting-edge scientific hypotheses as well as speculations that make the ETH look the intellectual dinosaur it is. Here, I will very briefly bring the story up to date.
History
Charles Fort was among the first to note that strange "meteors" appeared somewhat coincidentally with earthquakes. It had to wait until the 1960s, however, for veteran ufologist, John Keel, to associate the appearance of unusual lights with areas of geological faulting and magnetic anomaly, as well as with the occurrence of earthquakes. It was the French researcher, Ferdinand Lagarde, though, who most tightly focused in on the UFO-fault connection in the '60s. In the USA, John Keel likewise promoted the real phenomenon as "soft" light phenomena associated with faulting and other geophysical factors. In 1967, American author Vincent H. Gaddis made a pioneering stab at separating out luminous phenomena in his Mysterious Fires and Lights. In 1975, Andrew York and I published research on Leicestershire, in which the occurrences of recorded strange phenomena over a number of centuries were geographically mapped. Both archival accounts of meteorological anomalies together with reported UFOs were found to have had their greatest incidence over the faulted regions of the county. Two years later, Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist and geologist at Laurentian University in Canada, together with Gyslaine Lafreniére, published a study of the United States which similarly indicated a correlation between higher levels of reported UFO activity and the locations of earthquake epicentres.
Persinger and Lafreniére saw UFOs as electromagnetic phenomena arising from the tremendous energy involved in the constant rising and falling of tectonic stress in the Earth's crust, whether or not full-blown earthquakes occurred. They visualised fields of forces operating evenly and quietly over very large geographical regions which could become focused at any given time in a few small areas of particular geological resistance or instability such as fault lines, ore bodies or mineral deposits, stubborn rock outcrops, hills, mountains, and so on. They likened this to the energies in the atmosphere being equally capable of producing a gentle breeze over a wide area or a localised ferocity like a tornado. "The existence of man upon a thin shell beneath which mammoth forces constantly operate, cannot be over-emphasized," they argued. This was the first outing of what has come to be known as the Tectonic Strain Theory, or TST.
Harley Rutledge, a physics professor at Southeast Missouri State University, organised field investigation of an outbreak of lights that began in 1973 around Piedmont. The results of this were published in "Project Identification" in 1981.
An important researcher into light phenomena is John Derr, a leading U.S. geologist. In 1986, he joined with Persinger to study an earlier outbreak of lights in the Yakima Indian Reservation, Washington State. Firewardens on the reservation saw huge orange lightballs floating above rocks, as well as smaller "ping-pong balls" of light bounding along ridges. This remarkable period of sightings also included the occurrence of unusual meteorological effects such as glowing clouds indicating a charged atmosphere, and subterranean rumblings suggesting some kind of tectonic association. The firewardens organised themselves, and photographs were taken of the lights and triangulated observations using radios were made.
Toppenish Ridge, Yakima Indian Reservation; one of the localities where many lights were seen.
Derr and Persinger showed that the Yakima lights were seen most often in the vicinity of the ridges that cut across the reservation - each riddled with faulting - and with Satus Peak, the general area of a surface rupture and one of the stronger earthquakes in the region during the 13 years covered by the study. Successive reporting of lights occurred in the seven months preceding the biggest earthquake of the studied period. Regional seismic activity also increased during the times in 1972 and 1976 when most sightings were reported.
(The irony of the Yakima case is that the reservation is adjacent to the part of the Cascades Mountains where pilot Kenneth Arnold saw the flight of nine glittering objects in 1947 that initiated the flying saucer era . In fact, Arnold landed his plane at Yakima airfield shortly after his encounter. It is also worth noting that Arnold, did not, of course, se disks at all, but what he described as tadpole-shaped objects. This also struck a bell with me because as a schollchild in Leicesterhsire in 1957, I experience the powerful earth tremor there, and I recall one of our teachers decribing how he had seen a row of high flying lights earlier that afternoon. The lights looked tadpole-shaped, he said. Later, the local papers revealed that these objects had been widely seen over surrounding counties as well.)
A giant light hovers over a peak in Hessdalen Norway.
Photo by Leif Havik/Project Hessdalen.
It was the outbreak of lights at Hessdalen, a valley 70 miles southeast of Trondheim in Norway, that most firmly switched on the earth lights agenda. From about November, 1981, people living in the area, which is rich in copper and other metals, began seeing unexplained lights. These appeared as spheres , 'bullets' with pointed end downwards, and inverted "Christmas tree" shapes. Colours were mainly white and yellow-white, though others were also reported. Strong, localised flashes in the sky were also observed and there were reports of underground rumbling sounds. In March, 1982, the Norwegian defence department sent two airforce officers to study the situation. By the summer of 1983, hundreds of reports of strange lights had been made by the inhabitants of Hessdalen, and so Norwegian and Swedish UFO groups formed Project Hessdalen. From 21 January to 26 February, 1984, they continuously monitored the valley using a range of instrumentation, including radar, and succeeded in obtaining photographs of strange lights plus a number of instrumental readings. Such work then continued sporadically over a few years.
1982 saw my first book on the subject, "Earth Lights", and the following year British ufologist, Jenny Randles, came out with "Pennine UFO Mystery", telling of luminous and other phenomena in the hill chain, and making connections with tectonic factors. Inspired by the Norwegian effort, Project Pennine was formed in 1986 by David Clarke, Andy Roberts and colleagues. Visual historian and writer Hilary Evans, started circulating archival portfolios called Bolide among researchers interested in what he was calling BOLs (Balls of Light).
The Devil's Elbow, a sharp bend on the B6105 in Longdendale, the Pennines. A fault crosses the road here and strange phenomena have been reported at this point.
Meanwhile, earth light activity steadily decreased in Hessdalen but over 50 observations of light phenomena were made during seismic monitoring in the Saguenay - Lake St John region of Canada by Quebec University between 1 November, 1988, and 21 January, 1989. According to a report in Nature, balls of light several yards in diameter popped out of the ground sometimes close to observers. Other balls of light, both stationary and moving, were seen many hundreds of feet in the air. Some of these had durations of up to 12 minutes. It seems that these phenomena were coincident with rising tectonic strain.
In my "Earth Lights Revelation" of 1989, with David Clarke and Andy Roberts, geochemist Paul McCartney and I published a report on our long-term investigations into an "earth lights zone" between Barmouth and Harlech in north-west Wales which had been active in 1904-5. Because useful contemporary reports had been made of these Welsh lights (which included blood-red spheres a few feet across rising from fields and roads, glittering diamond shapes hugging isolated roof ridges, and a whole range of luminous phenomena), we were able to accurately map the locations where they occurred. When these were matched with newly- available geological information it was found that the lights followed the course of a major local feature, the deep-rooted Mochras Fault, like beads on a thread. Furthermore, it transpired that between 1892 and 1906 there were several earthquakes in various parts of Wales. In October, 1904, for example, immediately prior to the onset of the Barmouth wave, there was a quake at nearby Bedgellert. (The area is also adjacent to the Lleyn Peninsula, one of Britain's most active seismic areas, and epicentre in July, 1984, of an earthquake registering 5.5 on the Richter scale. This event brought the lights back briefly - the evening before the quake, a resident saw a brilliant white light "the size of a small car" float in from the sea and disappear over the brow of a grassy dune on the beach.)
On two occasions on March 25, 1905, balls of deep red light were seen to emerge from this field next to the chapel at Llanfair. Recently, high-tech surveying has revealed that the Mochras Fault runs directly through this field.
Into the field
By 1990, I had arrived at the conclusion that the only way to really understand the nature and mechanics of earth lights was to attempt scientific field study of them. So, working primarily under the auspices of a research/think tank group known as the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL), sufficient funding was obtained to start conducting field enquiries.
In June 1993, we looked at the so-called "Hooker Light" in New Jersey, USA. In the 1970s, crowds of youngsters regularly gathered to view a strange light that seemed to wander around on an old disused rail track near Washington Township. Then a research group calling itself "Vestigia" did work there. The track is now a pipeline corridor through a forest, and we were able to prove that the effect was caused by a visual distortion of car lights on a road that cut the corridor at an angle two miles from the viewing point.
Setting up the earth lights observation station on Mitchell's Flat, Marfa, Texas.
Other, inconclusive studies followed, then we visited the Marfa area of Texas' Big Bend country between 6-15 March, 1994, where strange lights have been reported for over a century (the first account, in fact, dates to 1617). Physicist Hal Puthoff, also an ICRL member, joined this expedition. We were eventually able to dismiss a number of luminous effects popularly assumed to be "Marfa Lights": occasional mirage effects can raise lights normally hidden over the horizon into visibility, sometime reproducing the same lights in tiers, and lights of vehicles 30 miles or more away on the Marfa-Presidio road are so distorted that they can appear anomalous. We also determined that lights on vehicles negotiating rough tracks belonging to isolated ranches on the undulating desert- scrub area known as Mitchell Flat can look like mysterious lights skimming the ground, fusing and parting. Nevertheless, interviews with local witnesses convinced us that genuine anomalous lights probably did sporadically appear in the vast region. Acting on a tip offered by a teacher who had closely encountered a three-foot diameter light, we conducted observations in an uninhabited valley in the Chisos Mountains, on the Rio Grande 80 miles from Marfa. At 9.10 pm on 12 March, a large white flickering light was seen at the foot of a nearby mesa. It lasted for about 10 seconds. (Although I have witnessed undoubted earth lights on previous occasions, this is the only light I have seen on our organised fieldwork to date that I am absolutely sure was an anomalous lightform
Physicist Hal Puthoff works with computerised equipment during a night observation session in the desert near Marfa, Texas.
Between 24-27 March, 1994, Erling Strand, one of the directors of the original Project Hessdalen, convened a conference of invited international delegates variously studying earth light phenomena and plasma physics. It was the first specialist earth lights conference, held to launch a new Project Hessdalen, and went unnoticed by mainstream ufology. Strand had also taken the view that serious field research was needed to study earth lights, rather than endless theoretical debate and nitpicking. With the support of Ostfold College, Norway, where he lectures, Strand is engaged on the "wiring up"of the Hesddalen valley, which is currently experiencing a modest resurgence of earth light activity. Automatic monitoring stations (optical and instrumental) placed strategically along the valley will be triggered if electronic beams connecting them are interrupted by an earth light. As Strand comments: "We only need one light."
One of the Hessdalen Conference delegates was Professor Yoshi-hiko Ohtsuki, who is well funded to investigate reported earth lights zones around the world. He revealed that he had taken four highly- equipped expeditions to Marfa, and that on only one of them had he seen a true earth light. This changed shape only 100 yards in front of his team and was captured on multiple video cameras and electronic monitoring equipment.
Erling Strand helps to set up an earth lights observation station in the Australian Outback before the sun sets.
Photo: Paul Devereux.
Between 28 September and 14 October, 1995, Strand and I, accompanied by a TV producer with a Hi-8 video camera, conducted a joint expedition to the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, acting on reports sent to Jacques Vallee and myself of strange lights in the area. We were attracted there particularly because there was no light pollution from distant trraffic or habitations. Our enquiries among local outstation workers and Aborigines indicated that light phenomena incidence had dropped off in the past decade, but lights were sometimes still seen. We had camera arrays plus a range of monitoring equipment, including a magnetometer constantly measuring the Earth's magnetic field local to our observing station, which was relocated five times during the expeditionary period. On the night of 3 October, we set up position overlooking a small valley in totally uninhabited country. Short-lived blue-white lights appeared sporadically through the night, moving against the opposite slope of the valley, half a mile away. These lights, often of low-intensity, proved elusive, but Strand may possibly have captured one of them on camera.
Monitoring and watching for the mysterious "min min lights" in the Australian Outback.
Photos: Paul Devereux.
By 8 October we had seen only a few possible anomalous lights at other locations, but that night a bright light was seen that seemed to emerge from a small hill in front of a ridge. It was vividly noticeable in an area devoid of all artificial lighting. (I should emphasise that the darkness was so unspoilt in this remote region that on one occasion we could discern the "glowing coal" of a meteorite hurtling across the sky even after its glittering trail had dissolved.) The light moved slowly downwards to the level of the desert, then disappeared. Although all our cameras were pointing in the other direction, towards an area where lights were most expected, we managed to swing a few round and hurriedly photograph the unusual light.
One of a sequence of telephoto shots of the mysterious light.
Photo: Paul Devereux
Because it was up to six miles distant, we could not absolutely determine if it was truly anomalous, but simultaneous with its appearance our magnetometer started recording huge field anomalies. (A peak-to-peak amplitude of 800 nanotesla on a 2 Hz pulsation was recorded. A normal amplitude on that frequency is less than 1 nanotesla.) The readings slowly subsided through a period of about five hours. If these events were causally connected, then the readings support one of Persinger's predictions that earth lights will be accompanied by changes in the local geomagnetic field.
What are earth lights?
There are two separate questions about earth lights - how they are produced, and what their nature is. In arguments about whether or not the TST is valid, they often get hopelessly jumbled. It doesn't matter if the TST is right or wrong, or requires further modification, it does not tell us about the properties of the phenomenon itself.
As far as the tectonic connection goes, I leave to you to have noted the repeated passing references I've been making to tectonic factors, and these could be expanded a hundredfold. It seems clear to me that seismic and geological sources are likely factors in earth light propagation. Persinger is probably correct in claiming that tectonic strain and the geomagnetic field are key players, even if the exact processes involved have yet to be fully clarified. Ohtsuki thinks that meteorlogical forces may also be implicated. In the final analysis, it is probable that whole concatenations of geophysical forces are involved.
The wild magnetometer read-out that accompanied the appearance of the light. The normal, thin trace can be seen at the bottom.
Photo: Paul Devereux.
But what is the nature of the lights themselves? The anecdotal literature contains descriptive themes that are repeated so often, from different times and places, that it is highly probable objective characteristics are being referred to. From this considerable reservoir of data, we learn that the lights can be any colour, though white, orange, deep red and yellow-gold predominate. Their size can range from ping-pong balls of luminosity to giant lightforms, though "basketball size" is common. While their shapes are usually round or spherical, tubes, cigars, rectangles, diamonds, tadpole-shapes and irregular forms have frequently been described. When witnesses have had a close looks, a teeming inner activity is sometimes reported within lightforms. Reports indicate that earth lights can issue sounds of various kinds, though hissing and buzzing noises predominate, sometimes accompanied by a feeling of pressure in the ears. Particularly bright earth lights are often said to be intense without being dazzling. Multiple earth lights seen flying together can display seemingly co-ordinated movements, as if operating within a single field, and divide and merge. They have also been seen emerging from or disappearing into the ground on numerous occasions, reinforcing a geological-tectonic connection. When free-floating, they commonly seem to prefer the vicinity of mountain peaks and ridges, isolated rooftops and rock outcrops, towers and antennae and other sharp or isolated features that tend to be charge collectors. This indicates that they have some kind of electromagnetic basis. They often haunt bodies of water such as lakes and reservoirs, and are occasionally seen glowing beneath the surface of the water. Bodies of water can apply pressure to underlying faulting (microquake activity around reservoirs is fairly common), as well as lubricating rocks - moist rocks are known to be able to emit more charged particles than dry ones.
The prevailing assumption is that earth lights are plasmas of some kind. This might possibly bes supported by the 1994 work of You-Suo Zou (of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing's Academy of Sciences, and an associate of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Utah). He made a close study of the original Project Hessdalen's collected data, and he noted photographs of light traces which revealed a corkscrew-like effect. Zou saw this helical structure as typical of a plasma vortex in motion, a structure particularly visible in the laboratory when plasmas are breaking down.
Zou added that under certain conditions, a plasma vortex can become a kind of solitary wave (soliton) and from the behaviour of some Hessdalen lights as recorded on the project's radar, he said he observed clear evidence of wave energy propagation.
But there are three other little-known aspects noted about earth lights that might be giving us clues as to their deep nature.
- (i) Earth lights seem to be going "on and off" all the time. Indications of this come from various sources. One example relates to a photograph taken by Tony Dodd of two lights flying over Carleton Moor, Yorkshire, on 14 March, 1983. I showed a first generation print of this to the physicist and writer, Fred Alan Wolf. Among seveal features he noted about the photograph was the fact that a faint, dark vertical line ran through each of the lights, evidence that they had been rapidly flickering - a strobing action that had left a record of the camera's shutter in the dark lines. Such strobing can be unnoticeable to the human eye, as persistence of vision (flicker fusion) gives the impression of continuous luminosity. This seems to be the case in an incident recorded by Project Hessdalen where a light observed as continuous and floating across the sky returned only intermittent radar echoes. A third example was provided by trained physicist David Kubrin and his first wife who saw a lightform hurtling along at treetop height above the Pinnacles Fault (adjacent to the San Andreas Fault) in California in 1973. As it travelled, the light created shockwaves in the air ahead of itself, indicating the presence of mass, but then the light stopped its motion instantaneously, without deceleration, suggestive of no mass. Kubrin caught the decay of the lightform on camera.
- (ii) Earth lights can sometimes be visible from one direction, and not another. There are numerous accounts of this bizarre effect. During the 1905 Barmouth-Harlech outbreak, for instance, a four-foot- long bar of blue light hovering over the road near Egryn chapel was visible to a group of observers from one side, yet completely invisible to a group standing on the other side of the phenomenon.
- (iii) There are occasional witness reports that an earth light does not seem to exist quite properly in space, like a poor special effect in a movie. As if it was both flat and had depth simultaneously. In 1983, for example, a farmer in the Pennines saw a red sphere of light hovering above a stream, then it started revolving while giving the impression of being flat. I have personally witnessed this unsettling aspect of lights and can vouch for its reality.
Taken collectively, such descriptions hint at a phenomenon at the very edge of normal physical manifestation. It has occurred to me that we may be seeing a macro-quantal phenomenon, a large-scale expression of the paradoxical conditions (from the viewpoint of classical physics) of the subatomic quantum field, the underpinning of all physical reality. Puthoff suspects that earth lights might be powered by something called Zero Point Energy. This is an all- pervasive energetic field, a fluctuating energy that exists even in "empty" space - the vacuum - and even at a temperature of absolute zero. It is known to have small-scale physical effects, but some scientists, Puthoff a key figure among them, feel that is possible to extract useful energy from vacuum fluctuations. It may be that nature has been doing it already, on an impressive scale, in the phenomena we call earth lights. Perhaps the lights are a kind of doorway between quantum and large-scale physical realities.
Meanwhile, David Fryberger is developing a theory which has the lights resulting from a hitherto unknown particle he calls the "vorton", more exotic even than gluons, quarks and the other subatomic entities postulated by nuclear physics.
When they finally give up some of their secrets, earth lights could have a tremendous impact on quantum and plasma physics. And they may open doors to physics we do not yet know. They may help change our very view of reality.
Earth lights and the paranormal
There may also be a consciousness connection with earth lights. Apparent paranormal phenomena is not infrequently reported in areas experiencing periods of earth lights activity. At Yakima and in the Pennines, for examples, people have reported seeing fleeting manifestations of human figures - usually of bizarre appearance.
Paul Devereux experiences mind-altering effects with the "magnetic helmet" in Michael Persinger's laboratory.
Photo: Charla Devereux.
Voices are heard: one Yakima firewarden told of hearing "happy little voices singing" and another of a disembodied voice "hollering". Earth lights researchers argue that these are hallucinatory effects caused not only by energy fields associated with light phenomena closely encountered, but generally in an area that is producing strange luminosities, affecting brain function in witnesses. Such fields are probably, in the main, magnetic. Drawing on known clinical data, Persinger has gone to some lengths to postulate a series of physiological and mental symptoms a witness would likely experience at different distances from an earth light. Further, he has been conducting a series of experiments in which subjects are placed in a soundproof, isolated chamber, where they wear a helmet from which magnetic fields are directed at the magnetically sensitive temporal cortex, which handles dreaming and other internal imagery such as memory, among other functions. Many people who have undgone this experience report vivid inner imagery episodes in which early and infantile memories are particularly common.
In a few cases, it is possible that people who closely encounter earth lights are triggered into an "alien entity" experience or even a full-blown UFO abduction. If one reads Budd Hopkins Intruders with care, for example, it can be seen that the pseudonymous Kathy Davis encountered a ball of light before undergoing her abduction episode. In fact, everything in this classic and now famous abduction case is consistent with an earth light being produced by local tremor activity. And hers is not the only one. For instance, I think even the Travis Walton case may be amenable to an earth lights approach.
But are earth lights UFOs?
Whatever the rights or wrongs of this, the cry that inevitably goes up from mainstream ufologists is: "But earth lights aren't UFOs!" This charge brings us full circle. Certain specific queries are regularly raised, and I'll finish with the most common:
Question No.1: Surely earth lights are something other than UFOs?
A. Reports of small balls of light have always been in the ufological record, where in the past they have been identified as "drones" or "probes" sent out from alien craft. So why dismiss them now if they suddenly take on importance as phenomena in their own right?
Question No. 2 What have earth lights to do with "daylight disks"?
A. If earth lights are a form of plasma, then there is no problem with this, because a plasma seen in daylight does happen to look shiny and metallic, and is likely to have a spherical, ovoid or discoid form. Moreover, there are pitch black objects sometime seen by day (Both Strand and I have witnessed examples of these ourselves) which seem to be photon-absorbing instead of light-emitting. These bizzarre phenomena - which can be round, square or irregular in form - may relate to earth lights in the way one pole of a magnet relates to the other.
Question No.3: But what about the size usually ascribed to flying saucers? Small balls of plasma, seen as lights or even as metallic forms can't account for those, surely?
A. Some earth lights are reported as being many yards across. A modest example of this was shown in the Quebec case (above) - the size, height and duration of some of these phenomena were clearly "UFO standard". The lights at Hessdalen ranged up to even larger sizes. And lights seen at night, accounting for a huge percentage of all UFO reports, can look large if bright enough - their size is easy to overestimate. It is equally easy to falsely interpret lights at night as being on a huge dark object.
Question No.4: How do earth lights explain radar-visual cases? How can a ball of light be tracked on radar?
A. It has in fact been proven that plasmas can return radar echoes. Indeed, even plasmas that have too low a temperature to emit visible light can still reflect radar waves just like a metal surface. During the first Project Hessdalen, radar echoes were repeatedly obtained from invisible objects hovering near ridges.
Question No.5: But what about markings on the ground and damage to foliage associated with some reported UFO landings?
A. These are quite consistent with localised damage caused by energetic lightballs. Singed foliage, ground burns and grooves have all been associated with ball lightning, for example.
And so it goes. If any of the very small percentage of UFO reports that claim structured craft are genuine, they may be ET vehicles, or may be a sort of phantom effect I have discussed elsewhere. But it is exceedingly important that we not confuse an actual sighting with witness interpretation of that sighting. Interpretations and actualities can be different things. There is no reason why earth lights and ET craft shouldn't co-exist, of course, but earth lights researchers think it is an extraordinary coincidence that earth lights descriptively fit so much of what may the residue of genuinely unexplained phenomena.
Copyright:© Paul Devereux, 1997
- Make sure to log onto: www.hauntedvalley.com (the Project Pennine site, accessible via the WebRing from this site), and www.hiof.no/crulp/prosjekter/hessdalen (if that doesn't work, then just do a search for "Hessdalen"). Both sites are highly informative and offer real-time webcam observation for earth lights.
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