RHOLDRWYG: What was it for??, Part One.

This set of, I think it will be three, posts is about Rollright Stone Circle and the druids. I'm far from my academic and UFO "home turf" here, so caveat emptor, and don't expect too much. I personally will be satisfied if you get a little pleasurable "diversion" from the grind of the day.

The aerial shot above is, of course, the magickal place itself. The photographer did a great job, too.

The subject was, as usual, inspired by my own desperate thrashing around to try to find something interesting yet not overly taxing to cut through my own "grind". I think that the little book above supplied the interest but the path was a lot of work. I acquired this little almost pamphlet-like illumination of the Rollright Stones and it brought back nice memories of an all-too-brief visit there. Go if you can, folks... "Atmosphere" barely does justice to the ring.

So, what is this place? The circle is made of a soft stone unfortunately --- a local oolite limestone which is relatively easily erodible --- great for awesome appearance, but we could have wished for better for durability over the centuries.

The circle stands today in Oxfordshire next to a country road and a farmer's active field. The aerial shot to the left does a magnificent job of showing the area. Just across the road, directly left in the photo, is a tall monolith called the Kings Stone. On a line almost directly towards the top of the picture from the circle [just beyond the photo edge] are a group of large stones leaning into one another, named The Whispering Knights. Most people think that the complex is related piece-to-piece, and the folklore certainly pulls them together.

It's hard to say for sure when these megaliths were erected. Prior to about 1800BC is probably a minimum, and they could easily be part of the Age of the Megaliths which included the raising of the original circles of Stonehenge and Avebury. Whatever their real age, OLD screams out at you while you are in their presence. Neither Stonehenge nor Avebury [and I was duly impressed by both] came close to the instant impact of "WOW" that I had with this place. I realize that this was totally irrational, but real nonetheless. The photograph below gives a rare really fine impression of that "atmosphere".

So, OK, it's an old stone circle. So what? Well, maybe nothing. Maybe something profoundly important. Let's at least take a glance.

It would be helpful if we knew what the place actually looked like when it was intact. We don't and we aren't. We can give some thanks to John Stukeley [the guy above] for helping resurrect interest in the megaliths back in the 1600s, so we have a little glimpse that far.

As the simple drawing at the left shows, Rollright was in disarray even back then. Stones were broken, fallen down, and some hauled away. The drawing itself, though aligned somewhat accurately to the north, gives a wrong impression of a too-cramped space, as some of the gaps in the ring are too small. As this is a bird's-eye view, our sketcher has depended upon artistic imagination to an extent. Still, it's valuable and sets a foundation for understanding of the design.

The sketch below is more careful and ground level. It was made in the late 1800s. It differs, especially in showing the gaps, but also in apparently showing more total stones. Statements have been made that an effort was made to re-erect some stones, and "replace" some by bringing back removed ones. What all that amounted to, who knows? But it cannot give one confidence that every current stone is placed exactly as the builders would have set them, nor that every stone has returned. Part of the pragmatic folklore of the place is that some stones were not only removed but broken. Still, this sketch shows a circle with the axis in the sketch pointing north, perhaps over two of the taller stones, and fairly directly at a megalithic barrow nearby. {C}. The King Stone is at A, and another barrow, called the Arch-druid's Barrow is at B.

So, we've got an extremely old megalithic ring on our hands, sitting in the midst of several other megalithic structures, and Druid legends swarming all about them.
People finally tried to do more disciplined accurate mapping of the place in the early twentieth century. The above is one way of displaying this [from 1920]. When you compare this to the 17th and 19th century drawings, you see more stones and better accuracy on showing the empty places in the ring. It shows you a nearly perfect 100' diameter circle, which is an intriguing number to me at least, but brings home the difficulty of guessing the actual stone-placement design. This next statement is irrational so don't give it much credit: when I've looked at the drawings and the remains [especially the more modern surveys], I have the impression of some rhythm or pattern to the remains, as disrupted as they are. That rhythm "says" to me "four 15s" or "60". And then I read Percival Oakley Hill, the local minister and writer who grew up with the stones, and he said: "The circle, no doubt, consisted of 60 stones". This was despite the broken nature of many of them so that you count in the 70s today.

Sixty.... if true, that would not be accidental. "60" is THE number of the early mathematicians. It is THE arithmetical facilitator; divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30. Powerful, powerful arithmetic tool: the reason why the ancient Mesopotamians settled upon it to divide up the hours and minutes of the day, and the "circle" of the heavens for astronomical and time measurements. One wonders if our megalithic builders were doing the same?

The line sketch above shows the relationship between the ancient circle and the King Stone and the Whispering Knights.

The Knights are nearly due east from the circle, and, though over three football fields away, are easy to see across the relatively flat farmer's field.

They are composed of similar stone as the circle stones with similar weathering. They are falling down, perhaps even moreso during the 19th century, though none of those known to the earliest students have been removed in the meantime. The charming but absurd legend of these stones is that they represent certain certain officers of the army of the King, all of whom were turned to stone by a bad encounter with a witch [who still resides nearby, and herself turned into an elderberry tree]. The stones actually seem the remaining parts of some megalithic building. Whether this was something associated with a burial or not, we can't honestly say. Archaeologists are always claiming that such structures are "tombs", but rarely have that sort of evidence, in my opinion. Let's just leave it with the idea that the building was important to the ancient builders, who expended a serious effort on it.

The sketch above of the Knights shows them as more erect and intimidating. It was made in the 1700s and may indicate a more awesome structure, particularly with a stone "roof" added on. Whatever this thing was it seems important.

Back at the circle, there is at least one stone [maybe there are more, but I found one without looking for any] which has a nicely drilled hole in it, the patina of which looked quite old.

Others have noticed the hole, though I've not found commentary about it. Above and to the left are two "tourist pictures" of the thing findable on the net.

The tourist photos don't seem to be directed anywhere, but my [admittedly dim] memories of my encounter with Rollright say that when I squatted down to look into the stonehole, I found that I was looking across that farmer's field to the east. Now, that's simply true. What MAY NOT be true is my memory that I was looking at the Whispering Knights. [The tourist photo to the left is NOT looking at the Knights, but you can see that it is crooked a little bit sideways, so I'm not sure what the photographer was attempting to show].

If the stonehole does indeed point to the Knights, and if it is indeed old and "original", then this constitutes what we are always calling an "alignment" for a purpose of some kind. And, therefore might be part of the answer as to what Rollright "was for".

The third element of the complex always included and visited by the tourists is the King Stone. [For some reason, the two old stone and earth barrows are rarely talked about.] The King Stone is, of course, the greedy King out to conquer, who runs afoul of the Elderberry Witch and ends up petrified in stride as we see him. Although in the old days, without the intervening trees [and both our early sketches show the King Stone without trees between], the King Stone was very close-by and visible, there is nothing about the current visible structure of the circle which "points" to it. That would be nice, but we don't have such indicators. That doesn't mean that the original intact circle had no such "pointers", just that we cannot claim this.

Percival Oakley Hill, the author of the Temple of the Sun "pamphlet/minibook", however has his own idea. The sketch of the King Stone from the book is above, showing much better detail than typical earlier sketchwork. Hill believes that the flattened area near the top was not only deliberately carved, but was done so to create a "chair" for sitting, complete with carved chairback. He believes that sitting in that chair was part of some circle-related ancient ritual.

So, folks, I'm leaving it for today. This has been the boring old "let's set the basics" post. I hope that it wasn't too bad. Next part I'll try to do better. AND, you'd better come back to read it or the guy above will visit you on Samwain in the dead of night.

CAN YOU LEARN ANYTHING BY JUST COUNTING??

Can you learn anything just by counting? Perhaps not, but the impossible hasn't stopped us yet on this blog so here we go. This posting is about, mainly, triangular-shaped UFO reports ... well the reports aren't triangular-shaped as far as I know.

This odyssey has been stimulated by a semi-whacky friend of mine who asked the question: are triangles and rectangles being reported in greater amounts now than they used to be?? [We can assume that my friend looks a lot like the guy to the left, although he doesn't at all. ... still, after what his question put me through in a crude attempt to answer it, it gives me great pleasure to think that the picture is exactly what he looks like].

I gave an opinion that one could get one sort of take on the question just by going to the National UFO Reporting Center [NUFORC] website and counting the cases and the shapes. Yes!, he said. Great idea!! Go for it. Somehow telling him that my suggestion implied that HE "go for it" was doomed to failure, so, dumber than bricks, off to NUFORC I ultimately went to "count".

I must say that if any of you wish to do more of this sort of thing, my moral support goes with you, but count me out. What a tedious business!

I believe that my friend was stimulated to his curious question by the fact that several high profile cases over the last couple of decades have featured triangular shapes. Belgium, Phoenix, Tinley Park [Chicago] come to mind. One of the first problems that comes up with this is what are the witnesses calling "triangles"? The "object" might be a clearly structured technological device, a dead black silhouette, or just three lights which seem to maintain their relative positions as they move.

Looking into every triangle case on NUFORC to dissect out such subtleties VERY QUICKLY became a ridiculous task for anyone but someone obsessed. I had to admit that I myself was in danger of such psychiatric diagnosis just because I'd even considered the project, but I was determined to avoid institutionalization at the minimum.

So, here is what I will jokingly call my "research methodology" on this one: A). I went to NUFORC and found that the site listed cumulative numbers of all cases by month. I added all the month numbers in a year and [note the brilliance in this] called the sums "total cases for the year-X".

B). NUFORC also had a listing for all cases of certain shapes [not, alas, by year or month, but just a running calendar]. I counted away each year until I got to the end. These figures I called "triangle UFOs per year"; this is why I get the Big Bucks.

C). I could then divide B by A and get the % of triangles to all cases year-by-year.... yes, even a monkey could do it. I then could make the following graph.

But there was one other thing: as said earlier, there are one person's triangles and there are another person's triangles, and they might not be at all the same "beast". How did I solve that problem, you say? In the simplest of means: I said to hell with it. If the witness said triangle, by gum, triangle it would be. So, ready or not here's the graph:

Hopefully you can see that the graph has the %s running up and down, while the years run horizontally. The oldest covered year is 1985 at the far right, going across to 2011 at the far left. But what does it say??

Let's take the pink line first. That line is making the statement that all those years fall into a narrow range of 8.5 to 12.5% of cases triangles to total reports. It is my meagre judgement that all those years are so uniform as to %s that trying to tease them apart would be way too much overanalysis.

And I think that you could make an argument that all the "non-pink" years fall into a similar result too.

The only underachieving year was 1995 at about 6.5% [the blue column]. The overachieving years ranged from 14% to 19%. Note that all of the "abnormal" years are the earlier ones. There are two explanations for this: 1). there really were a slight increase in triangle UFO events back then, and tend to be slightly less now [the exact opposite of what my friend thought --- a fact in which I take some inappropriate pleasure], OR, and I suspect that this has some real merit, 2). the smoothing out of the curve as one goes to the more recent years is mainly the operation of the law of large numbers.

Why? NUFORC went through three phases: an early phase of not a lot of public recognition in which only about 2 to 3 hundred cases per year were received; a transitional stage where 1 to 2 thousand cases per year were received; and a mature stage where the yearly count is 4 to 5 thousand cases. As the total case count gets smaller, the numbers become less uniform, more erratic, though still not exceptionally so. I'm going to split the difference on the hypotheses and say that there has been a slight diminuition of triangle cases by percentage, but surprising regularity across two and a half decades. What this regularity says about the veridical nature of the phenomenon I am not sure --- it's an "objective" fact, since these people didn't know one another, and I might be the only person on the planet fool enough to dig the graph out, SO maybe it somehow supports the truth of UFOs [but we all know that I'm prejudiced that way].

But what about rectangles [the other shape that my friend speculated about]? Groan..... back to counting.

This time I tried something different but harder. I counted every shaped craft category by category. Not wanting to die before the job was done, I picked just two case-heavy years [2010 and 2000] a decade apart. If rectangles [or anything else] was going to make their move, they had a decade to do it.

The most interesting thing to me that I found is incorporated in the graph alongside. As NUFORC has grown in popularity and greater case reports, what I would call the Quality of an average report has diminished. Shaped objects shrunk from just over half to less than 43% of the total. More people are reporting any old thing. The "handiness" of an easy reporting outlet seems attracting every wannabee sighter puzzled by the sky. It's another internet effect --- more noise in the channels.

Throwing that problem aside, what about rectangles and their assorted buddies? In these years, and all across the board, the sightings of shaped objects are dominated by the "Circle/Sphere" category, closely followed by the "Disk/Oval" and "Triangle" categories. These things range from c.15% for the Spheres, to 9 to 12% for the Disks, to 9 to 11% for the Triangles. No other category [rectangles, diamonds, eggs, teardrops, cones, cylinders. cigars, chevrons, or even "miscellani"] reaches 2%. Within those "minor forms", there was a remarkable similarity of low percentages even as to the rankings. Cigars rank miscellaneous rank diamonds and cylinders [freakily equal both years] ranks teardrops and chevrons [again freakily equal] rank cones. The only diversion from this was the again freakily equal eggs and rectangles of the year 2000. They came in after the diamonds and cylinders, but perhaps they got together and said: I'll [the rectangles] go ahead more and you [the eggs] drop out. So, sadly for me, the rectangles DID increase a little over that decade, BUT THEY'RE STILL PIPSQUEAKS!! So there.

The real thing that actually did freak me out a little during these counting sessions was the strange uniformity of the %s of the category counts. Yes, there were scattered differences, not every number was the same, but I at least got the --- it was a bit more than just a "feeling" --- that I was counting something that hung together somehow. And THAT's something that I can neither explain nor defend adequately.

Some people will read these meanderings and immediately come up with lots of other research projects --- how many of those triangles were really huge? What were the other years like as to the total shapes array? How many of these cases actually had enough detail that you could call them a good case?

To that I say: quit flapping your gums and get counting!! Nothings stopping you. ... except you, of course.

Before closing this, I'd like to include a last "counting" fact: When you look back at UFO reports historically, it's obvious that Triangles did not occupy as large a % of the cases as they do now. But from current day back to 1985 on the graph there is no sign of that. So WHEN did the rise start? As usual, I don't want to make too big a claim here, but I did read the Timmerman files. John Timmerman collected 1179 case reports from people who just walked up to him at the various shopping malls at which he was showing the CUFOS UFO exhibit. About 2 and a half % of those were triangles. John's cases more or less begin where my graph left off and go back into time. This has the feel to it that the jump in triangle cases was a 1980+ onward phenomenon. Something pushed those %s from 2 and a half to ten or more that we see today.

....... tell me about it.

KNOCK, KNOCK: What's NOT There???

This event has been subconsciously nettling me ever since I posted on it way back whenever it was. The event seems strongly veridical; that's not the problem. The witnesses are multiple, corroborating, and credible. The reports are detailed. The "case" is solid --- well, not "solid" materially-speaking, THAT in fact is about the last thing it is. The problem is that it lacks at least two things.

The apparition [to very briefly remind everyone] took place in Knock [West Central Ireland] in 1879 and was an elaborate display of three iconic Catholic figures accompanied by other religious elements, including an altar. The apparition was outside at the back of a small church, and occurred at dusk with [shortly into the experience] a light rainstorm. The scene above should therefore be painted darker and with rain. Many locals saw the thing which lasted long enough for people to go around telling others about it. In short, the event occurred.

But, as I said above: things were missing. The first thing missing that bothered me immediately was that there was no [known] communication of any religious message. Although this is one aspect of the event that actually makes it MORE credible [in that no religious motive to make stuff up can be assigned], it puts Knock into an extremely bizarre status of an apparently religious event with no religious content. The only possible reasonable counter to this would be if one imagined that some religious message was transmitted to the rector of the chapel, Bartholomew Cavanaugh [to the left], but he never said any such thing and in fact did not go out to see the apparition himself. It seems VERY unlikely that Cavanaugh would have received a revelation from the Blessed Virgin Mary and mentioned it to no one. This made another idea grow in my mind: this wasn't a religious apparition at all. But if not, what? The answer to that I cannot give, but I am going to speculate on it because there is something else missing here.

The RAIN. Precisely the rain "inside" the apparition. At least two people went all the way up to the images and stuck their hands into the area. No substance to the images; just, apparently, the light. And NO RAIN FALLING THROUGH THAT SPACE. Although the rain was falling lightly all around, no rain fell through the images and the ground below did NOT get wet. What-in-the-heck can THAT be all about? That is what has been subconsciously bugging me about this real but exceptionally weird event.

I cannot explain that, but I CAN make a fool out of myself by guessing. Rain came down everywhere. It came down on the "top" of the apparitional scene. But once entering that geographical area, disappeared. It never continued to fall, and it never hit and wet the ground. Where did it go? I say that it went to wherever the source of that apparitional vision came from. Somewhere, somewhere else, got wet.

What do I guess happened? Somewhere in our old world there was a nice indoor chapel scene with statues of the Virgin Mary and the other figures and something strange twinged in the universe. Two relatively small spaces exchanged. Not wholly physically, the substance of the statuary did not manifest, but something allowed all the light from that space to be transmitted elsewhere to a field in back of a little chapel in Ireland. Observers could see it all, and even walk up and try to touch, but except for the light and the space itself, it was "out-of-touch". The observers could reach into the lighted area but not feel anything. They could remove their hands because they still had the material attachment outside that space to do so.

But what happened in the "other" place?... in the lighted chapel?? Well, I wasn't there, but how about a usually pleasant lighted altar to the Blessed Virgin suddenly vanishing to be replaced by an empty dark rainy space?? Maybe even with the odd phantasm of a bodiless hand appearing and being withdrawn?? ................................. That ought to give you some weird thoughts to chew on for awhile. Out Proctor, indeed... "The TRUTH, as we know here on this blog, IS Out Proctor".

So, why is this picture of a "Fairy Fort" mound from Ireland sitting here at the end of this blog entry?? Who cares? When you're far enough Out Proctor anything goes. But, seriously I think, one of the really old words for these Faerie mounds in the ancient celtic tongues is "knock".

Whoops.....

LET THERE BE {a little} LIGHT! ... maybe.Part Two.

Part two of another strange walk in the dark. One good thing to start with though is that while I was muddling about on this blog's history on BOLs, I stumbled across one of Wayne Laporte's photos of the Gold Hill lightball phenomenon that I'd posted back in 2009. So it sits there above in all its glory. My memory is that Wayne was able to get off more than a half dozen shots of this particular manifestation, and a smaller number of a second one during that research session at Gold Hill. I do not remember the date. It was very early in my active going-to-meetings phase of renewed UFO interest once I became a college prof, so perhaps very early 1980s or 1970s.

What is presented below is on topic but from a different perspective. This may not be good internet manners but I think it's OK. When I was thinking of doing these posts, I surfed about and came onto a website specializing in North Carolina mysteries. They were "doing" the Brown Mountain lights in the entry that Google burped up. It was a good presentation, but not particularly additive to what we generally know... except in one particular: a LOT of people responded to the post. A great deal of these responders were disgusting jerks with nothing better to do with their time than to spew forth cheap shots from the safety of their mother's basement, but several were from people who felt that they had seen the phenomenon or had something productive to contribute. I'm going to present those selected remarks here.

Hopefully you can read the remarks in this first panel [Just clicking on it should do the trick but if not you probably have a "magnifier" function handy on the computer to blow this up a bit --- my own computer is "reading" this pretty well, so hopefully yours will too]. I find many of these remarks interesting in a variety of ways.

Easy to notice is that the posting elicited many reports of having seen this or similar BOLs in locations all over the globe. The comments are calm and adult. Very matter-of-fact. The proper use of the English language [a rare trait in internet posting] points to intelligent persons with a genuine desire to share what they feel is a real encounter. Several people are aware of the ball-lightning hypothesis and some are sophisticated enough to know that this doesn't quite sound like it. Someone even knows about "amateur" but disciplined attempts [ex. Vestigia] to make scientific studies. VERY impressive group of comments.

In the next panel of comments are a few specifically referring to witnessing the Brown Mountain lights themselves. One report of genuine ball-lightning occurs, but also another comment distinguishing it from these BOL manifestations. A person knows about Project Hessdalen, and another about the lights of upper Michigan, many cases of which have been seen near the lake for at least decades. Two of the respondents speak, in their different tones, about a possible spiritual element in the experience. Again, the difference between the sensible reporting of these people and the braindead remarks made by armchair debunkers and streetcorner jerks [two varieties of the same species --- one just uses bigger words] boggles the mind.

The third panel of comments shows another phenomenon familiar to UFO researchers: get a conversation going [among real people; academics need not apply, usually] about anomalistic phenomena and all-of-a-sudden all manner of people are unloading the "strange encounter which happened to them". This is, of course, the John Timmerman phenomenon which happened to him as he carried the CUFOS UFO exhibit all over the country, and well over a thousand people came up to him to tell him of their stories. J.Allen Hynek always was astonished at how many people at his lectures put up their hands when he asked if anyone had sighted something that they considered a UFO [and how few said that they told it to anyone but family and close friends]. What this SHOULD tell us is that the encountering of an anomalous phenomenon is NOT a rare thing. It might be rare for any individual to have many of such things, but cumulatively we humans are encountering true mysteries all the time. Recognizing this would massively expand the consciousnesses of we human critters as we go about our typically mundane business.

As the map above indicates [this is a part of a map made by Teodorani and published in one of his very informative lectures], there are a vast number of lightball sites known in the Americas, and a great cluster of them are on the East Coast including the Carolinas. Whether de Brahm or his informant saw the mountain lights phenomenon right at Brown mountain or not is pretty irrelevant. Lights happen all around that environment.

The panel to the left is composed of reader posts responding to another regional blog which is interested in ghosts, ghostlights, et al. The particular posting was about the Thomas Divide Lights near Cherokee, NC. Once again, the original posting has catalyzed a flurry of previously unreported incidents of seeing the anomalous phenomenon. These brief descriptions are relative calm, literate, and intelligent, making no elaborate claims. In short, they would be great beginnings for a UFO field investigation, both interviews and on site mapping and precise descriptive inclusion of the environment and its circumstances. Of course, that will never happen. These stories will stay as they are untouched until they are lost forever in the electronic dissipation of cyberspace. So that is where all of the joy falls down.

The internet has been the enemy of real research on anomalous phenomenon because it encourages everyone, witnesses and potential researchers alike, to just "stay at home" and not make the effort to engage in a studied case investigation. The positive aspect of it is, however, that it has broken the psychological barriers to make some sort of report to the outside world. In UFOlogy we have had a saying that every investigating entity needs "an open door". That door needs to be easily seen, and ostensibly sympathetic/non-threatening. John Timmerman was one such "open door". But really responsible open doors are rare. The internet initially killed many open doors by turning the public out of organizations like UFO groups, and allowing "private" isolated shallow personal exploration of things with no sounding boards to maintain sanity, no personal discipline required, and no place anymore to effectively report. Therefore we went into a hey-day of do-nothingism. This has allowed debunking to achieve a nearly unopposed playing field for its misbehavior. Who can oppose? With that, all these matters threaten to become nothing but goofy entertainment, and relegate such real encounters to things that people don't want to talk about.

But now the internet is in its odd ways striking back. It IS an astounding expression of "democracy" and a liberating facilitator of expression. So here we have perhaps more persons being willing to mention their anomalous experiences than ever before.

But how to repair the investigation gap? How can this huge bounty of encounter micro-reports be harvested and the "good" ones competently investigated? We have not figured that out yet. When we do get a system [which will almost certainly need to have the cooperation of many website masters to inquire as to whether their posters would allow a real investigation], we might indeed enter a new age of plentiful data collection.

The occasionally-producing lightfields like Brown Mountain, Yakima [above top] and Hessdalen [above bottom] are rarities which can fight off the reporting problem above because the are "prolific". Real researchers feel that it might be worth their time to go there whether they have witness reports to collect or not. We are particularly fortunate that the Italian scientist Massimo Teodorani has been willing to robustly take these challenges on.

The photo above is of a Hessdalen object from one of Teodorani's presentations.

This is the scientist which this field has needed. He has gone to many locations around the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia to set up his equipment and scientifically [yes, the word is used precisely accurately in regards to this] measure what is going on as the phenomena allow.

There is no question, despite anything that debunkers want to claim, that SOMETHING is going on. Teodorani has demonstrated that at least in spades. That something may be purely the product of Earth forces [just geological or some more complicated mix of things], or there may be more to all of this well beyond that. The phenomenon may be part of the conventional plasma physics of the future, but it is NOT in any conventional sense "ball lightning". Whatever is going on, there is a lot of physics involved and some chemistry apparently... that is, there is a physicality to this manifestation, not only photographable, but analyzable by spectral displays. But what really IS it?

With one of Teodorani's lightball pictures above [this one from, I believe, Ontario], I am reminded of an old blog posting that I made early in all this business [10/1/09]. The posting was reflecting on the close encounters which people were having with BOLs--- not at famous lightfield locations, but the sorts of reports that find their way into the UFO files. These reports seem extremely germane to the lightball "solution". The UFO literature is much "closer" to these BOLs than the typically long-range sightings at Brown Mountain or Hessdalen. And the "action" seems different when one of "us" is nearby.

This may be BS, but the BOLs seem much more "perfect" when we are near --- perfect spheres rather than flexible blobs are the norm. What might that mean? Your guess. Also, the BOLs seem sometimes like J.Allen Hynek's randomly "meandering nocturnal lights', but sometimes their "meanders" are not random at all, but seem to be directed or purposeful. THAT of course sends us immediately WAY Out Proctor. [As a side thought: the "nocturnal" part of this may be just the ability to see them at night, not that they are only out at night --- they could be flitting all around in the day, too dim to really notice]. The title for that 2009 blog entry was: BOLS-- Curious, Mean, or just Brainless? And THAT is the $64,000 question isn't it?

Are BOLs made by a complex of just right conditions in the Earth and the atmosphere and that's all there is to it? Or when these areas of force and light and gaseous substance do manifest, do they provide some kind of opportunity for someone/something else to "jump in" and "drive about"? Manic Musings? I suppose....

WHO or WHAT is really behind those orange balls of light??

LET THERE BE {a little} LIGHT! ... maybe.

Hello again, folks. This is another "spontaneous" blog posting and, as usual these days, not a polished effort. You may find it interesting enough though, I hope, and go "out there" in cyberspace to make up your minds for yourselves [which hopefully you do all the time anyway, but without cyberspace necessarily playing a role].

The catalyst for the post was the book pictured above. GHOSTS of the CAROLINAS by Nancy and Bruce Roberts who wrote a trilogy of coffee table books about haunts in this area, this one in 1962. I had purchased a double handful of such books for my sister-in-law, since she lives in that poltergeist house and is naturally interested in the subject. While putting this one away, I just thumbed through it quickly and there was a short chapter on the Brown Mountain Lights. They, of course, rang a marginally-UFOlogical bell, and so here we are.

I found that the chapter was surprisingly good for a slender thing, and this may even have been used as a beginning source for several other commentaries about the lights. The picture below, allegedly of the lights in full bloom over the ridgeline, was prominently therein.

Another impressive thing about the Roberts' short chapter was that they knew about the claim that an 18th century surveyor had seen the lights --- a claim of huge significance to the debate as to whether they are nothing but automobile or locomotive lights. This claim goes as follows: There was a man named John William Gerard de Brahm born in central Europe [no Germany existed yet] in 1717. He trained as an engineer in the army of Emperor Charles VII. War wasn't for him, and he resigned and emigrated to the American colonies in 1751 to work as a surveyor and building designer for the British in South Carolina. He was so good at it that he was promoted all the way up to Surveyor-General for the area from Florida to Pennsylvania by 1764.

The British had just finished a war with the French and wanted good coastline maps fast; they also wanted good interior maps to set the western boundaries of the coastal states. De Brahm was charged with much of that [the map below is one of his own, and the map above left is an example of a finished map of the times]. It is allegedly during one of his innumerable surveying expeditions that he saw the Brown Mountain Lights. To the joy of the skeptics, he probably didn't. To the joy of the romantics, someone else probably did.

The quote-of-note [from his 1771 book: Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America] goes as follows: "The mountains emit nitrous vapors which are borne by the wind and when laden winds meet each other the niter inflames, sulphurates and deteriorates". This has been taken for de Brahm's attempt to explain the Brown Mountain phenomenon. Well, sort of.

What de Brahm was doing here was giving a theory for how gases and atmospheric chemistry involves some sort of cycling with the interior of the Earth. He is an early chemical theorist trying to explain combustion [without any knowledge of oxygen] and a thinker of that age which was just emerging from the concepts of alchemy. In fact, de Brahm, though an effective practical pre-scientist, was really a mystic and a bit of an alchemist at heart. The skeptics of course love this as it gives them free rein to act like jerks and smear the "foolish" primitive-thinking man [whose IQ was probably 50 points higher than their own]. But that skeptical Ha-Ha is just a bit quick for me.

In order to do his vast work, de Brahm needed a lot of help. He had a great assistant named Bernard Romans, and was also markedly aided by the superintendent of Indian Affairs, John Stewart and a young explorer [and confidante of the local Native Americans] named Joseph Purcell. De Brahm would have had no need to write about why lights appeared upon the mountains in interior North Carolina unless somebody told him that they DID. WHO got that information? Romans? Stewart? Purcell? By direct experience? Told by the locals? In the end what is important is that there were reported sightings of mystery lights associated with mountains in interior North Carolina at least as far back as the 18th century. Right at Brown Mountain? Again, no matter. The North Carolina mountains are full of these locations. Brown Mountain is just the most famous.

The question then comes down to this: are there sightings of mysterious luminous phenomena at Brown Mountain specifically, or at other locations in the hills? The glib rapid-pass-off saying that no one ever saw such things pre-autos seems just false, despite the clever manipulating attempts by the impossibilists.

The photo to the left is allegedly of a light anomalous. I have no idea as to whether it's a mystery --- it just serves as illustration. Skeptics say that all studies of the claimed phenomena come away concluding that all the sightings are either reflections of auto/locomotive lights or direct sightings of them, lanterns, and fires. As is almost always true of these people, they are saying such things either because they are ignorant or just liars [I will let them choose].

How could I say such an uncivilized thing? Because I know, at least somewhat, and respect, a very good field investigator who has spent serious time there. His name is Mike Frizzell and he is an intelligent honest man, and no fool. Frizzell initiated something called The Enigma Project to look into such mysteries first hand, down-in-the-dirt in the field. Frizzell himself saw the lights. He knew that most reports were wannabees --- the exact misinterpretations which the skeptics want everything to be. But these lights, rapidly and multiply weaving their way below the ridge lines were not those mundane things. Mike Frizzell is the known credible expert witness that you can found your case upon.

Many, many others have seen the mysterious lights. And it's probably true that 90% of those cases were mistakes. But somewhere around Brown Mountain strangeness occasionally goes on and we don't know what it is. Another group who realized that was ORION, a network of researchers associated with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I know the organization as having persons known to Dr. J. Allen Hynek, with senior advisors who, at the same time that ORION studied Brown Mountain, were doing "midnight" gratis testing of field samples from the famous Delphos, KS landing trace case. ORION stated that although many of the Brown Mountain reports were of mundane objects, there were definitely some that could not be. Thus, again, the skeptics fall into two classes: ignoramuses or liars.

Brown Mountain is far from alone in the state. The Brown Mountain area is the dark oval surrounded by the dashed line in the map above. To the East, at the Google map marker, is Gold Hill, about 20-25 miles as the anomalous light flies. Gold Hill has its own lightball phenomenon.

Although the photo above is of an Ontario lightball taken from a published presentation by the outstanding researcher Massimo Teodorani, it is nearly identical to a series of photos taken of the Gold Hill light phenomenon by Wayne Laporte, a very good UFO researcher from North Carolina and someone that I have also interacted with successfully in the past. Laporte is a researcher that I also respect as an honest man, and a good reporter. He admits that he was fortunate on one visit to Gold Hill to attempt to photograph the lights and got multiple shots of two [at least] of them. [I apologize folks for not putting Wayne's own photos up here, but, as usual, it's the "me in Wheeling; stuff in Kalamazoo" problem. Wayne's photos are quite like the Teodorani photo, just a bit less colorful].

So, I have pretty good, nearly personal, reasons for thinking that lightball phenomena occasionally and unpredictably express themselves in at least two areas of that state. There seems to be a third area, the Thomas Divide Lights near Cherokee, NC which would be also in this same sort of geological terrain. Whether that points to "Earthlights" whatever they may be, I honestly am too devoid of data to guess.

As to "explanations" then: once you get the skeptics 90% pile of wannabee misinterpretations out of the way, you are left with geo-produced natural lightballs, Faerie, ghosts, UFOs, native american spirits ... oh my, where have we heard THAT list before? In part two of this fine fiasco, I'm going to mention some "grass-roots" sightings and just a little more theory --- so be forewarned.