Brown Mountain Lights at Linville
Often, when I'm in the region of Grandfather Mountain for photography, I stay at the Parkview Lodge in the little community of Linville Falls, North Carolina, owned by friends David and Cindy Peters. Last Sunday night, Cindy invited me along with some investigators, a parapsychologist, and others to Wiseman's View at Linville Gorge to observe the Brown Mountain Lights... I couldn't pass on that opportunity. The Brown Mountain Lights are a phenomenon that has been observed in this area for centuries... just not by me.
To be honest, I didn't expect to see anything other than what I knew was already there... silhouettes of the surrounding mountains, bright stars in a dark sky, the Moon, planes and a flyover by the ISS. Those who were not investigators became evident as the night wore on... for many of them, everything became "Brown Mountain Lights", including high-flying airplanes, stars that they thought were moving as clouds passed nearby, and perhaps moonlight dancing across the fog in the gorge. As is the case of many "mysterious" encounters, well-meaning folks are merely fighting their fears, but fear often doesn't fight fair. Then there was a person or two present who seemed to enjoy stoking the fires of those fears... over the years, I've found that anyone that prefaces their next statement with "This is the God's-honest truth" invariably means the next words out of their mouths are just so much guano... makes you wonder at what point they were not telling the truth.
Truth is defined as whatever conforms to reality... the truth for me is that I did see and photograph those lights that night and also the next night when I ventured out there by myself. They occur in places where you wouldn't expect to see light, such as on cliff sides and above trees. I carry a small, yet extremely brilliant Fenix PD32 UE tactical flashlight rated at 740 lumens for walking these trails at night... for as bright as it is, it doesn't approach anything close to the brightness I observed from the lights from over a mile away. Despite the advancement of science, the lights remain a mystery and their source unidentified... but there is an answer to everything in nature. "Unidentified" merely means that it hasn't been identified... yet. A geologist pointed out that there is much quartz in the exposed rock of these mountains, capable of piezoelectric effect... but in my own experience, there is a problem with that association with the Brown Mountain Lights.
Nearly everything in nature is capable of taking on an electromagnetic charge, even you... just drag your feet across a carpet and touch somebody else when the humidity is low, and they will let you know of their displeasure at your ability to take on a charge. There's a lot of voltage to that little spark, but not very much amperage... otherwise you may have electrocuted your friend. Quartz has a stable crystalline structure, so stable, in fact, that it is capable of given invariable clock frequencies when specific voltage is applied (that's why quartz watches are so accurate). When that voltage stops, the resonant energy goes with it, and the quartz becomes inert. The piezoelectric effect of quartz requires a mechanical process to discharge a spark, and only a spark, as the crystalline structure is displaced. Expansion and contraction of the solid material around the quartz in these mountains may give off enough mechanical displacement to cause a spark, but that same quartz would seem quite incapable of producing the kind of energy that would generate the lights.
I experienced them as blinking into existence, becoming increasingly brighter. They were obviously as bright behind them from my perspective as they were from the front, as they lit up an area around them. They changed colors and had an ionizing effect around them, much like videos of ball lightning I'd seen before... and they moved. Back in the days of early electronics, capacitors (devices made to charge and then discharge voltage at specific rates) were made by stacking mica dielectric and metal plates. Both of these materials exist in these mountains in great quantities. There likely may be big naturally occurring "capacitors" in these mountains capable of extremely high discharge... enough to cause the strange ball lightning-like qualities that seem prevalent with the lights. The mystery remains a mystery (what's observed is not duplicatable in a lab), but I'm throwing my theory out there, having seen them for myself.
I was told by the others who had seen them before, that on a scale of 1-10, that I probably experienced a 4, which was deemed remarkable for a first time observation. While that's quite nice, I'm opting for a 10 sometime in the future... and when I do, I'll have this under my belt as practice for that shot. This image was taken at an ISO of 3200, which can be a bit noisy, but it allowed for exposures of around 5-seconds or better on this moonlit night. It was shot 1.25 miles from the monolith of Table Rock across from Wiseman's View. While the lights aren't huge from this perspective (I've marked them with a note on the image... just scroll over it), they are well defined, quite brilliant, and in different colors. I also took other images from 100 ISO with 3-minute shutter durations... they make the mountain appear as more in daylight, but they also give evidence of lights all over the mountain. Watch the video here that gives a good presentation of what you could see, some of the science considered in the investigation, as well as a nice shot of David and Cindy's place: www.brownmountainlights.com/ Micah Hanks (in the video) was present with us that Sunday.
Over the years, I've come to detest the Christmas song "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer"... that one line, though, "as for me and Grandpa, we believe!"... I can relate.
Brown Mountain Lights at Linville
Often, when I'm in the region of Grandfather Mountain for photography, I stay at the Parkview Lodge in the little community of Linville Falls, North Carolina, owned by friends David and Cindy Peters. Last Sunday night, Cindy invited me along with some investigators, a parapsychologist, and others to Wiseman's View at Linville Gorge to observe the Brown Mountain Lights... I couldn't pass on that opportunity. The Brown Mountain Lights are a phenomenon that has been observed in this area for centuries... just not by me.
To be honest, I didn't expect to see anything other than what I knew was already there... silhouettes of the surrounding mountains, bright stars in a dark sky, the Moon, planes and a flyover by the ISS. Those who were not investigators became evident as the night wore on... for many of them, everything became "Brown Mountain Lights", including high-flying airplanes, stars that they thought were moving as clouds passed nearby, and perhaps moonlight dancing across the fog in the gorge. As is the case of many "mysterious" encounters, well-meaning folks are merely fighting their fears, but fear often doesn't fight fair. Then there was a person or two present who seemed to enjoy stoking the fires of those fears... over the years, I've found that anyone that prefaces their next statement with "This is the God's-honest truth" invariably means the next words out of their mouths are just so much guano... makes you wonder at what point they were not telling the truth.
Truth is defined as whatever conforms to reality... the truth for me is that I did see and photograph those lights that night and also the next night when I ventured out there by myself. They occur in places where you wouldn't expect to see light, such as on cliff sides and above trees. I carry a small, yet extremely brilliant Fenix PD32 UE tactical flashlight rated at 740 lumens for walking these trails at night... for as bright as it is, it doesn't approach anything close to the brightness I observed from the lights from over a mile away. Despite the advancement of science, the lights remain a mystery and their source unidentified... but there is an answer to everything in nature. "Unidentified" merely means that it hasn't been identified... yet. A geologist pointed out that there is much quartz in the exposed rock of these mountains, capable of piezoelectric effect... but in my own experience, there is a problem with that association with the Brown Mountain Lights.
Nearly everything in nature is capable of taking on an electromagnetic charge, even you... just drag your feet across a carpet and touch somebody else when the humidity is low, and they will let you know of their displeasure at your ability to take on a charge. There's a lot of voltage to that little spark, but not very much amperage... otherwise you may have electrocuted your friend. Quartz has a stable crystalline structure, so stable, in fact, that it is capable of given invariable clock frequencies when specific voltage is applied (that's why quartz watches are so accurate). When that voltage stops, the resonant energy goes with it, and the quartz becomes inert. The piezoelectric effect of quartz requires a mechanical process to discharge a spark, and only a spark, as the crystalline structure is displaced. Expansion and contraction of the solid material around the quartz in these mountains may give off enough mechanical displacement to cause a spark, but that same quartz would seem quite incapable of producing the kind of energy that would generate the lights.
I experienced them as blinking into existence, becoming increasingly brighter. They were obviously as bright behind them from my perspective as they were from the front, as they lit up an area around them. They changed colors and had an ionizing effect around them, much like videos of ball lightning I'd seen before... and they moved. Back in the days of early electronics, capacitors (devices made to charge and then discharge voltage at specific rates) were made by stacking mica dielectric and metal plates. Both of these materials exist in these mountains in great quantities. There likely may be big naturally occurring "capacitors" in these mountains capable of extremely high discharge... enough to cause the strange ball lightning-like qualities that seem prevalent with the lights. The mystery remains a mystery (what's observed is not duplicatable in a lab), but I'm throwing my theory out there, having seen them for myself.
I was told by the others who had seen them before, that on a scale of 1-10, that I probably experienced a 4, which was deemed remarkable for a first time observation. While that's quite nice, I'm opting for a 10 sometime in the future... and when I do, I'll have this under my belt as practice for that shot. This image was taken at an ISO of 3200, which can be a bit noisy, but it allowed for exposures of around 5-seconds or better on this moonlit night. It was shot 1.25 miles from the monolith of Table Rock across from Wiseman's View. While the lights aren't huge from this perspective (I've marked them with a note on the image... just scroll over it), they are well defined, quite brilliant, and in different colors. I also took other images from 100 ISO with 3-minute shutter durations... they make the mountain appear as more in daylight, but they also give evidence of lights all over the mountain. Watch the video here that gives a good presentation of what you could see, some of the science considered in the investigation, as well as a nice shot of David and Cindy's place: www.brownmountainlights.com/ Micah Hanks (in the video) was present with us that Sunday.
Over the years, I've come to detest the Christmas song "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer"... that one line, though, "as for me and Grandpa, we believe!"... I can relate.