Whatever these are they are certainly challenging. We have anexcellent picture here for once. It is a ninety second exposure. Wealso have some more observations. A report of a miasma with lighteffects is not ball lighting but does conform to my description of aslime mold forming a large methane holding envelope. Once such aballoon reaches sunlight at high elevations the lighting effect mustalso improve.
A night time event would at best describe a miasma or what has beendescribed as swamp gas particularly since it is luminescent.
I actually think we are on to something here. This is also anexplanation for fairy lights.
The reaction in direct sunlight is noteworthy and I would also expectthat the beach ball will also expand. Any improvement inluminescence would then become visible at a distance.
The movement is an artifact of strong wind currents up there.
Brown Mountainlights still enchanting
Swamp gas? Balllightning? Optical illusion? Brown Mountain Lights puzzle
By Mark Washburn
mwashburn@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Saturday, Nov. 03, 2012
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/11/03/3642639/brown-mountain-lights-remain-enchanting.html
MORGANTON No one knowsthe answer to the mountain’s mystery, including C.W. Smith, who hasprobably spent as much time around fabled Brown Mountain as anyonealive.
Smith, 67, spent 33years with the U.S. Forest Service, patrolling the Pisgah NationalForest as a federal law enforcement agent beginning in 1966.
He knows every fold ofthe ridge and is familiar with its marquee mystery, the so-calledBrown Mountain Lights.
He grew up in nearbyMcDowell County in western North Carolina and never much believed thestories about nocturnal flickerings. Then while working one night, hecaught sight of what looked like a bonfire on the mountain, but in aplace where there were no trails.
“It started going upthe mountain, too fast for someone to be using mountain-climbingequipment. It went up to the ridge line and disappeared.”
With that, Smithbecame a believer, he told a symposium on the phenomenon heldSaturday at Morganton Municipal Auditorium.
“If you ever seethem, you’ll never forget it because you’ve never seen anythinglike it before.”
Lights long-lived
Brown Mountain, arugged lump in the wrinkles of the Blue Ridge, has attractedattention since antiquity because of the lights.
Folklore holds thatCherokee Indians thought they were torches held by ghosts of grievingmaidens. An early European explorer, a German surveyor named G.W. deBrahm, studied the mountain in 1771 and concluded it vented “nitrousvapors which are borne by the wind.”
Other theories havebeen floated through the years.
In February 1913, theObserver ran through a few, including dust vented from a mica mine,then added: “Quite a few suspect that some moonshiner, who likesnot the limelight, is sending up the light on a kite to frighten hisneighbors and others out of that immediate vicinity.”
A U.S. Geologic Surveylater that year concluded people were observing refracted lamps fromlocomotives on the Southern Railway. Then came the Great Flood of1916, which washed away tracks and the theory. Trains didn’t runfor a spell, but the lights stayed on the job.
A 1916 study concludedthe glow was the result of “sulfurated hydrogen vapors” –better known as swamp gas.
In 1922, anothergeologist spent a week in the mountains and declared the lights werenothing more than auto headlights, train lamps and optical illusions.Fred May, editor of the Lenoir News-Topic, called it shoddy science.
“Weather conditionswere such that he had only two cloudless and fogless nights duringthe week he was here making observations,” May reported.
Ball lightning theory
Dan Caton, a physicsand astronomy professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, isone of the foremost academic researchers of the lights.
He believes mostsightings are bogus – people are seeing campfires, headlights,aircraft, even the lights of distant Lenoir. Caton, who spoke atanother symposium on the lights in February, estimates that maybe 5percent of reports are legitimate.
He favors a theorythat the lights are ball lighting, a little-understood butlong-observed phenomenon.
He has interviewedpeople who describe misty or fireworks-like miasma about as big asa beach ball floating up the mountainside, a good account of balllightning. Why it occurs with regularity in the Linville Gorge, hesaid, needs to be further explored.
Caton and a team fromthe university are setting up a camera pointed toward Brown Mountainthat will feed to the website brownmountainlights.org and should bein operation by month’s end.
Photographic evidence
One of the bestpictures taken of the lights was displayed at the symposium byCharles Braswell Jr., a Taylorsville professional photographer whosework is familiar to readers of the Our State magazine.
In 2001, he shot avideo of lights rising above the north ridge mountain, then openedthe shutter of his camera for a 90-second time-lapse exposure. On thevideo, the light flared and ebbed, then crept to left, paused anddrifted to the right.
On his film, it left astreak painting its path, which Braswell estimated was 3 miles long.
He said Brown Mountainis full of deception. People think they’re spying the mystery, butreally only looking at campfires, mountain bikes or off-roadvehicles.
“They’reunmistakable if you know what you’re looking for,” Braswell said.“There’s only one way to see the lights, and that is to spend alot of time looking.”
A close encounter
On one still autumnnight, Les Burril had a close encounter.
“Something justilluminated a few feet away,” said Burril, a career Forest Serviceofficer who worked six years in the Pisgah.
“It looked like acandle. ... It continued to brighten for a few seconds and just satthere. Another one lit up a little farther away. I probably stoodthere eight or 10 minutes and watched. It moved down, smaller andsmaller, then blinked out.”
Burril, assigned tohunt poachers and vandals, said he never thought much about thesilent apparitions on his beat.
“We weren’t paidto look for the Brown Mountain Lights. I always looked at it as somekind of physical phenomenon. I wasn’t worried about them. Now, aguy who might rise up out of a bush under the light, yes.”
Burril, 56, retiredand living in Georgia, said he has no idea what they are.
“There are guys alot brighter than me who have tried to figure it out, and I didn’teven try.”He’s not alone. Noone knows the answer to the mountain’s mystery.
Read more here:http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/11/03/3642639/brown-mountain-lights-remain-enchanting.html#storylink=cpy
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