My grandmother was terrified of what she called "Old Red Eyes." On a clear winter night on their farmhouse, two glowing red orbs shined menacingly and even seemed to blink. They weren't always there, she said, and mostly came in autumn and winter, when spirits mingled with the living world, and the wind would howl with the cries of Old Red Eyes. She swore it was a devil haunting her after she lost a child, or even that, since it was coming from the direction of the cemetery where the toddler was buried, that it was the soul of the child himself, angry at her for following a doctor's bad advice that directly led to the boy's death. As a gullible child with a big brother who LOVED to prank me, seeing Old Red Eyes when we'd visit in winter had me terrified to the point where I refused to sleep in any room with a window that faced the eyes. My no-nonsense grandfather finally had enough. He put me and my brother in the car and drove toward the "eyes." In no time, I realized that they were simply a couple of radio towers in the next county over, so distant that they normally fell below the treeline. In summer, the treeline blocked the red lights on the top of the towers, but in autumn the leaves fell, and if the wind blew just right, then the lights "winked" in and out of visibility through the trees. The howling was simply due to the direction of the wind blowing between two sheds on the property. He had apparently tried for DECADES to explain this to my grandmother, but she was extremely superstitious and refused to accept it... until the farmer who owned the treeline cut down some of the trees, exposing the entire radio tower with all of its red lights.
My earliest memory was lying in my crib, terrified of the pulsing red eye staring in at me from outside the window as the red light atop a radio tower steadily pulsed. I could feel is staring right through me. Its cold clear malice was tangible. It tasted like blood and tears. I would cry out and my mother would come, but she could not understand my pre-verbal gestures. It was coming for me. It can still give me chills to think of that feeling. A decade and a half later I understood instantly what it meant to be seen by the eye of Sauron when I first read Tolkien.
Last winter, when all the leaves fell from the trees, I was on my way home and saw the full moon straight down the road through the trees. I went to band practice on the same night each week. A week later I was on my way home, and saw the full moon again! The third week, I saw it again. And it dawned on me that there is only one full moon each month, and it wouldn’t be in the same spot each time either. Come to find out, it was a new water tower built a few miles up the road with a spotlight on it. I can’t believe I was so easily fooled, but it was a learning experience.
It’s interesting how creepy red tower lights can be. We had a tower in the mountains above the city to warn planes landing in the nearby airport. I remember watching the slow pulsing red light far off on the mountain as a kid growing up and being creeped out by it, especially by the slow rhythmic way it would shut off and come on, it felt light an ominous robotic alien watching us.
I saw the Marfa lights one time back in the 80s while attending a church camp in the area. This was before the lights became a tourist attraction. A group of us stopped along the highway and watched them for at least half an hour. Whatever we saw, it wasn’t headlights from cars. The lights were many different colors blue, yellow, red. Even changing colors. Each light moved on its own independently from the others, not in a pattern like you’d expect from cars following the road. We saw them move on freely left, right, up, and down. They even moved closer towards us and then back farther away. Some lights would split into two then reform with another light. And some didn’t move at all. They would dim out then reappear in the same spot sometimes. The research teams may have observed headlights but I really don’t think they saw the same lights we saw.
Never saw ghost lights, but I remember as a young kid being spooked by the way passing traffic would distort and stretch the shadows on my walls at night. Probably didn't help that our Mom told us our place was haunted. Thanks Mom.
why would you ever tell your children that your house is haunted? seems like quite a mean thing to do to your child. youre just giving them a reason to be scared in your home where they should feel the safest. >.
@@SpydersByte Well if the house is haunted you should tell your kids and give them some age appropriate training on how to deal with it. Don't anger the spirits, always be polite, don't open the red door etc. No reason a house can't have odd shadows caused by car headlights, and be haunted they aren't mutually exclusive.
@@SpydersByte Yep, I don't believe it's possible to get parenting right 100% of the time, but she would have saved me years of doing 10 yard midnight sprints to the bathroom if she'd kept all that nonsense to herself.
This is better than Joe's video, but it wouldn't have happened without Joe. Hmm, orbs can't happen without car headlights. Keep up the good work, and keep your ghost stories to yourself, that's scary ship!
As a kid I was sure that the house was haunted by a pair of disembodied shoes (see The Wearing of the Grin, Looney Tunes 1951 for context) and would hear it running about at night. I was terrified of this thing until one day I saw the cat scratching behind an ear with it's hind foot while sitting on the linoleum in the front passage and realised that was the source of the disembodied running feet I had heard so many times. 😂
My dad once almost had a heart attack when he spotted a bright blue ball of light chasing his car through a particularly thick fog. Just when he was on the verge of wetting his car seat, he realized there was a railroad parallel to the road and the light was some kind of electric arc caused by ice crystals on the power line as the train was passing
Parallel train tracks with a dark country road can be insanely disorienting. I never experienced it until about 2 years ago driving through rural Texas. It seemed I was absolutely going to be hit by the train at a crossing I could not see. I ended up stopped in the middle of the road standing outside my car to get perspective. 😅
As for the "lights following you" part, my wife tells the story of when she was a little girl and one night on the beach, she saw a carpet of silver over the waves in the sea going straight to the moon, which was low on the horizon. She says she walked along the beach and the carpet kept following her. And, indeed, it does, and there is nothing particularly mysterious about it, but for her it was magic and she still remembers it.
There are a lot of strange aspects to the 'ghost lights' that are not properly explained by modern science or folklore , like the Brown Mt. lights which are not flashlights, cars, mirages or reflections, and unlikely to even be UFO's.
I don't think it's being a wet blanket, nor should anyone feel bad about resolving a mystery. Finding out the actual explanation is fun, interesting and a great way to learn. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Also, understanding a phenomenon can help predict when it will happen, so more people can get to experience it first hand. We all know why solar eclipses happen, but that doesn't detract from the amazing spectacle - that we can predict centuries in advance.
@@glitchedoom We've been using folklore and mythology to explain the holes in scientific knowledge for literally thousands of years. The Greeks explained weather and mountains and time with Gods, we're still doing it today with "ghosts" and "aliens". The interesting part is that the more we know scientifically, the smaller the holes that need to be filled with folklore. We went from saying mountains were made by Gods to a moving light being ghosts. Makes me wonder how small we can go before we just abandon that idea. Folklore is ingrained in us as a species, I don't think folklore will ever go away, but it's being used for increasingly tiny things. The more we discover, the less we need to make up.
I saw a large glowing dome that seemed to be about 50 feet away in the woods shortly after dark. My buddy saw it too. We both agreed it seemed incredibly close, like just up the ridge in front of us. It was getting brighter and larger and glowing blueish and clearly was not normal for this wood. Then the base started to narrow and I realized instantly it was the full moon rising over the ridge. It really had looked like it was just nearby in the woods behind the trees. It was just a one off thing, but it really brought home how easily your perceptions can be deceived.
I saw 3 one right after another. Went up about 30 ft. & Dissolved. Then another showed up like a glow stick in a ball of cotton candy. For real. I had heard of swamp gas , guess that's what is was.
Thanks. My father told a story about this. He was quite consistent, and told it right up until he died. Born in '36, he was raised in a very rural area. He said that his father had a tree chopped down for some reason, and had people dig out - then burn out - the stump. He claimed that for several years after that, he could look out his bedroom window at night and see a light come up out of the hole. It would float along their 3-board fence, coming toward the house. He noted that he could count the fence-posts by that light. He said that a few times, he'd go outside, but the light would retreat down the hole & just go out. I have no idea what to make of any of that. Could it have been a recurring dream? Who knows? He was prone to a lot more magical thinking than I am; I prefer to intellectualize. But I still like a good story, and that's one. tavi.
It's a fun story. I think listening to these types of stories growing up is the reason I'm quite skeptical, because I had lots of family members who told stories like this, along with much more fantastical ones, such as communicating with aliens... they believed wholeheartedly what they said, to the point where it negatively effected their lives as people distanced themselves from these "weirdos". As I grew up I realised they were wrong, so when people say "I communicate with God" I can't help but think "but do you, though? Do you really?"
I saw a UFO once. Like legitimately saw it right outside my window, plain as seeing a passing car. I jumped up and went to another window to get a better look, and it was gone. The trick is I know for a fact it wasn't real, because I had just seen the exact same UFO on a TV show earlier that day. Somehow my subconscious brain brought up that image and placed it outside my window. I've never had a case of hallucination before or after this, and it's always stuck with me. How many other people have experienced something like that, but didn't have an anchor to reality like I did? I could never trust "eye-witness" again accounts after this.
I witnessed the Marfa lights in 1993 but when I went there in 2008 no go. It is a mesmerizing display. As the sun goes down one can establish a baseline. Yes, those are headlights on the mountain highway to the west and yes those are farmhouse lights turning on but after the baseline, it gets weird. The farmhouse lights remain static. Then the floating balls of light float towards you. It is utterly worth a trip to Marfa to see it. It's probably got a very mundane explanation, but I enjoy not knowing.
Imma Texan and I ain’t mad atcha😊 actually, I find the superior mirage phenomenon fascinating and no less….ironically…magical. Everything has an explanation. And the folklore psychology and how these legends come to be is lovely. Thanks, Joe!!!!
I actually witnessed a pretty wild light display one night when out on a date. We were sitting on the hood of my 74 charger when we saw multiple flashes of sideways lightning and similar electrical looking effects. Turns out, when the humidity and temperature are just right, the 1 million volt DC transmission lines near by put on a show!
Truly, Joe, when these mysteries are solved, the fact that natural conditions can exist which cause these mysteries is wondeful enough in my mind. Just because things like rainbows, haloes, sun dogs, the Death Valley racing stones, and green flashes can be explained doesn't make them less awesome at all!😊😊
True. If anything, it makes them even more interesting. As you said, the fact that things like this can occur naturally is pretty awesome. And people say magic doesn't exist! It happens all around us, more often than we realize.
@TÝR Definitely makes them more interesting. I didn't care to see any in person till he started describing what caused them, then they sounded worth taking a visit to see.
I remember seeing this wild light show in the sky. It honestly looked like lava pouring out in the sky above the horizon, it was incredible. It seemed large like the size of a full moon. Was it like an aircraft breaking up? Or a dimensional rip in space? And then I pulled out my phone to check the sky map and turns out it was just the moon being obscured by some dense clouds and the parts peaking out were bright orange. As the clouds passed through it made this neat rippling/dripping effect. It was hilarious but super neat.
This is a great demonstration of nature's ability to create fantastical illusions from rare meteorological phenomena. Coupled with our brain's ability to make connections and spot patterns in random uncorrelated events and it's no wonder the folk lore is awash with monsters and ghost stories.
I mean...none of us really know what the world actually looks like. It's all perception. I've sworn I've seen things from afar only for nothing to be there... tho, I've never seen lava pouring out of the sky on the horizon line. That would make my life complete.
I saw something like that when I was a kid on Halloween night, thought I'd never get an answer, it looked like a big asteroid or something - being 5/6 and on Halloween night I knew no one would believe me. Also saw a fogbow/moonbow one night which was a bit weird bc didn't know what it was, it looked like a giant glass dome on the horizon
I saw a small orange light "orb" weave it's way through my front yard one night. There was no light on in the yard or house, so it was not a reflection of an animal's eyes or anything else. I recall it being a fairly dark night. My eyes were accustomed to the dark, as I had gotten out of bed shortly before seeing it, so I could see some details of my yard fairly clearly and I had a good sense of space and distance, but nothing had any color, nor was anything else glowing. I believe it was later in the summer, but might have been early autumn, I don't honestly remember. The "orb" moved in a slightly erratic squiggly line about a foot or two off the ground, then vanished almost as quick as it appeared. Keep in mind too that I was fully awake, not even groggy. It moved almost like a bug, but there are no orange glowing bugs around here (not aware of there being any anywhere, to be honest). Before you think it was a firefly it was, a) not the right time of year, b) too big, I'd say it was about the size of a golf ball but almost impossible to say for sure, c) wrong color, D) glowed continuously for too long. I have no idea what it was. I've always wondered if it could have been a tiny ball lightning, but I don't recall the weather being anything stormy. There's a swamp nearby, but it seems too far for will o' the wisp to travel, at least as far as scientific consensus would suggest, and it only started glowing in my yard. The weirdest thing though.... I had just come back from getting a drink, and as I stopped in my room about to get into bed, I had this feeling out of nowhere that I should pull back my curtain and look out the window. Like, one second I'm not thinking anything, and then I just felt so calmly sure I should look out. Like, not like I NEEDED too look, just that I should. And I saw it down in my yard and somehow, despite being terrified of the idea of ghosts my whole life, and especially creeped out my mystery lights, I felt no fear at all. Just wonderment. This is in stark contrast to another totally different "orb" I 'saw' once, which I now think could have been a migraine hallucination (though it had never happened before and has never happened again despite frequent migraines, so I don't know). That one absolutely terrified me for weeks, especially when combined with frequent weird sounds, especially of of things being knocked over, or tapping in the walls. Even now I occasionally talk to or 'make an agreement' with the 'ghost' if I feel really anxious in that room, like, hey, don't bother me and I won't bother you, lol. No, I don't think it's a ghost, but it makes me feel better, and if there is a ghost, maybe it feels better too, haha.
I can understand your emotions, because I too same experience. And everything sync Right after waking up, after drink, hovering above land about a person height, orb , and loss of memory everything matching
what you experienced was real. i have no clue what the true source of any of it is - we have lots of labels for paranormal phenomena but none of them seem to do anything real justice. lots of people have experienced the same things as you, including the “bug-like” movement of the orbs and accompanying poltergeist-esque lingering phenomena. i suggest looking further into it!
I saw ball lightning in the mountains of Northern California. No mistaking it. It happened once, I was with someone else and we both ducked because it was coming directly at us. I initially thought the moon had detached from the sky and decided to swoop down on us. I Checked in with her when we reconnected 40 years later and we both remember it exactly as each other remember. An orb of light coming down out of the sky, dipping below the tree line, and quickly flying right up to the door we were standing behind. We could see it through the window in the door. If it was a car headlight they'd have crashed right into the house. Imagine seeing the moon ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE HOUSE coming out of the sky and rapidly growing in size as it got nearer. This orb was WAY too bright to be a flashlight in the late 1970s, and the edges far too crisp and sharp. It was a very well-defined bright round ball. If it was a super-luminous floodlight it would have had to have been mounted to a zip line and sent down from the tree tops. We both tried to duck at the same time to get out of the way and it disappeared.
@@christinejalandoni5919 if it was on Thanksgiving and was used to cook a duck,chicken and turkey at the same time, would that be called a "haduken turducken"?
I live an hour away from the Thai-Lao border in Udon Thani, Thailand. The town Nong Khai is adorned with effigies of the Naga and it's famous for viewing the Naga lights at the end of the rice harvest (Oct). I tried going to see the lights then, but there were too many people making their own fires and lighting off fireworks to tell if the light being seen was from the Naga lights or people lighting something up. Unfortunately, it was underwhelming and the people gathered to party made it difficult to study.
There are a few abandoned mines in the Hessdalen valleys. We did find an abandoned mine entrance even, but it looked too dangerous to go inside. Our host, Peder Skogaas who welcomed most researchers into the valley, showed us that he managed to create electricity with elements he gathered around the mines. His theory was that Hessdalen is creating natural "batteries" with the different minerals and metals found in the ground and that it might be cause for the lights. There are so many interesting stories and even research data from Hessdalen, it's crazy. Thanks for looking into the Hessdalen lights! Much appreciated!
It has been 3 years to the hour since my stepdad died, & he was more of a Dad than my actual father. Honestly seeing this video pop up from my favourite UA-camr feels very personal. Even though it is a complete coincidence, thank you for uploading this. No matter what, I'll enjoy this video. Thanks again!
@@Roguescienceguy thank you very much. In 20 minutes it will be 3 years since the worst 2 moments of my life, answering the door to the police officer telling me, to walking 5 metres to wake up my Mum up to tell her. In that moment I remember thinking "please transport me to 1 year from now", but 3 years later it isn't any better. Its just so tough...
As someone who's been a surrogate father figure I can tell you from my point of view he must've been one heck of a man to mean so much to you. I bet he talked the world up about you, too. 😉 And I'm sure the last thing he would want is for you to feel this pain. And I'm just a stranger saying nice things, but this stranger has seen strange things I grapple with when trying to understand it. There's more to life, we just can't explain it yet. Is there something "next" for us in another life? I dunno, but I've seen too much to remain a skeptic. And as someone who's lost I hope it gets easier as time goes by. I wish I could say it gets better, but it does get easier. Hopefully this random hug will give you a little smile on this most painful day (((Hugs)))
@@shannonm7981 you could try celebrate him by living a good life by his values. I know it's hard and I don't know you but I'd give you a big hug right now. You seem like you are a person with a good heart, I can relate to that. Take good care of yourself, alright? Make him proud🥲
@@shannonm7981 That sounds a lot like my youth. I lost a lot of people all at once on top of so many other challenges. Sucks when you have to grow up so quick. But it does harden you for anything life can throw at you. Hence it doesn't get better, but it does get easier. Damn, the su***de is rough. I'm sorry you went through that. As someone who is in that club myself, the second chance club if you will, damn... One thing to remember about this, we typically do this because we think we are unburdening our friends and family from whatever problem is eating us alive. It sounds so counter intuitive but remember our brains are effectively broken at that time. There's so much to unpack that I'm not going to try here, i apologize. Just reassure him that you care, that you're not angry or upset for what he did. That convo will come later. Just remind him you still love him. And PLEASE get him to a counselor if he hasn't already. It does work when you apply yourself... Sadly I speak from experience. And as silly as this sounds having someone _you_ can just talk to is incredibly important as well. Be it a close friend, family or even a counselor, it's the only way to fully work through the pain. It took me twenty years of suffering through that pain alone before I finally accepted the help. I'll be 44 this summer and I still see a counselor. But I've also seen death in person, in very graphic ways, to very close people. But with talking to people I learned it's okay to hurt, for most of us it's something we all face eventually. But holding it in because you feel you shouldn't, or can't talk will just eat you alive. Sorry, didn't mean to rant, but you really do remind me of how hard it was. I dunno, call it a message from Dad, but I am the youngest also, and I still (try to) hold it together for them. But you do learn and grow from it all. I look at it this way, if you want to dwell on the past, remember the good things.
My maternal grandmother had a story she loved to tell (which was corroborated by my mother and grandfather who were present at the time of the event) about an experience she had in Virginia when a floating orb (likely ball lightning since it was actually fairly common in the region) passed through the (closed) kitchen window, then through the (closed) door of the freezer, nestled itself between the ice cream and leftover chicken soup and promptly exploded the entire top half of the appliance it'd decided was it's new home.
@@macehilmatecilof4140 My suspicion (though, infuriatingly, there's no way to confirm it at this point) is that it was drawn to the compressor for the cooling system on the back of the fridge because it was the closest and/or highest voltage device to the window. Electromagnetic fields, something, something, attraction, something, something. I figure the explosion happened when the thing got close enough to the radiator to discharge into the copper tubing and rapidly heat (and, thus, expand) the refrigerant, leading to the tubing and/or compressor doing a boom. It's also possible the refrigerant could have ignited, as well, but the refrigerant in use at the time is different than the one used today 'cause environmental regulations, so I'm not 100% sure on that one. Or on any of this whatsoever.
@@meatharbor Well, don't know a LOT necessarily, but a couple principles might help you out... First, Cold Dry air in winter is a kind of "turbo-charge" in many places for static electricity fields... Things like Vandergraf generators or even the kiddie' trick of scuffing your feet on a carpet to shock the F*** out of someone tend to work better in the wintertime because if this... SO it's entirely possible the cooler air in the freezer was just hospitable to the thing until it settled close to the compressor... Second, old-school refrigerant was mostly those infamous CFC's one hears about destroying the Ozone, because almost nothing else will react with them, so they tend to actually be quite stable, most of the time... I don't know if there's a legitimate "disposal method" even yet... SO the spontaneous explosion doesn't seem like the result of no more than a little static discharge with the refrigerant in contact (somehow) with oxygen... BUT of course, I could be wrong... It's hard to say why the freezer exploded... BUT I hope this might help you along the way toward figuring it out eventually. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 A lot of old appliances weren't exactly built the safest (electronics were relatively new and a lot of safety stuff had yet to be discovered much less mandated), it's possible that ball lightning caused an arc/short circuit within an air gapped switch. With few exceptions when you turn off a power switch what actually happens is the contacts that allow current to flow are quickly pulled apart, the air provides enough insulation to prevent current from flowing (in high voltage circuits there may be a dielectric fluid instead of air but the switch is still pulled apart quickly). If the switch isn't separated enough or is separated slowly then an arc can form in which current does continue to flow (it arcs) but because air is a poor conductor extremely hot plasma is formed. This is also why light switches click (and if they don't click/stay in the middle it's time to change the switch because it's a fire hazard). Introducing plasma or a flame between the two contacts can also give the air a temporary boost in conductivity allowing an arc to form and once an arc forms it basically maintains it's own conductivity by continually ionizing the air. I presume ball lightning could also create arcing conditions and if a hot arc formed near the compressor that could create enough pressure to blow it up. That said I'm not sure if old fridges had a compressor at the top, it's also possible that an arc formed and set off a reaction or heated something else up inside the freezer enough to explode (explosions are caused by a rapid release of pressure so any pressurized container, even something like a sealed bag of corn, could become a bomb if it's rapidly heated).
There is an area in york/adams County in PA that we have had many MANY unexplained phenomenon over many generations. UFOs, UAPs, ghosts, odd electromagnetic activity, etc. Pretty recently, my mom mentioned a very bright ball of light floating over the creek below the house, following the water, in the middle of the night. She said it made no sound, and was moving at a consistent speed and height. She thought maybe it was someone in a kayak or small boat with an LED light, but it was going against the current, and didn't change it's course even when going over the area of the creek where the rocks and rapids are. Just steadily continued.... it freaked her out pretty good, and she likes to rationalize everything
Yes!! I'm in York and have seen some extremely bizarre things from swarms of bright orange objects in the sky, to a rhomboid silent craft stopping right in the middle of the sky over me, a huge stingray like craft with headlights, spirits, hearing strange things that you can't find any reason for.
@@mtjs8746isn't it wild???? I have heard of a couple people who have seen a "floating skyscraper" in the area around Thomasville and Pigeon Hill... I think this area is really underrated. Which is kind of cool for us.
Always think of balloons and young kids having fun. You can't explain it = /= mystery. Someone else can. Also, high voltage electricity lines, transformers, that kind of thing from a distance can be silent.
These generic bot comments are getting out of control. No relation to the actual video content, just generic "Golly-gee, you're the the best UA-camr EVER" platitudes
@@markmuir7338 your welcome! I am 100% real bro I promise 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭I swear some of these bots are getting so good that now I’m getting accused of being a bot ridiculous 😭
The Netflix film, "Summerland" uses the fata morgana phenomenon as a plot device. That was the first time I'd heard of the phenomenon so this video is a nice reminder to watch the film again. Thanks, Joe! And as a counterpoint to "preserving the mystery" -- for myself, learning how movies are made hasn't made me enjoy them any less. I think that knowing what causes these phenomena to happens doesn't detract from the wonder of it. Knowing how the Northern Lights work doesn't make them any less beautiful to see.
@@Whateverhasbeenmynameforyears My old pair of headphones had a feature where putting my hand on the right muff would switch them between transparency mode (amplifies sounds from outside, meant to make it easier to talk without having to take the headphones off) and noise canceling mode. Whenever I passed by a certain graveyard my headphones would start freaking out, rapidly switching between the two modes. I eventually realized that there were lines where it would happen, so if I stood in one space it would just keep switching but moving a little bit stopped it until I walked into the next line. Since the switch was based on a near field sensor (kind of like a mini radar but super short ranged and only points in one direction) I initially thought the overhead power lines were causing it until I realized it was only happening during the day then I figured out that it must have been from the sun hitting one of the gravestones and refracting off in just the right way. One of the gravestones is giant and has a shiny black color/texture to it.
I have a relative who lives near a major airport. As a kid, my cousins and I would lay outside on clear summer nights and look for lights on alien space ships. Of course we were seeing the lights of airplanes on approach to the airport that was within 20 miles of us. But we were little and everything about it was exciting. Staying up late, being together, having the chance to just be free to be kids and let our imaginations grow. Awww, I just made myself smile at the memory 💜. Thanks for a video that brought back such a warm memory, despite feeling like a heel who ruined the magic of something.
A friend of mine saw ball lightning. She was on a third floor of an office building, and during a storm, a globe of light the size of a soccer ball appeared through the wall. It appeared to roll across her desk, but instead of falling off when it reached the end, it kept on travelling horizontally in free-space until disappearing through the wall on the other side of the room.
My grandmother experienced this on a bus in England about 100 years ago. It certainly made me curious about the idea of ball lightning. A pretty cool phenomenon, whatever the cause.
@@osakarose5612 Apparently it seemed to be attracted to people. But nobody touched it. It came in through the glass window, went between a few benches, then went through the body of the bus. Not sure how much of that is invented memories though.
@@TheJunky228 I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion. I'm an engineer, and there are all sorts of ways to make sparky light shows that defy expectations. The question is whether nature can create these. I doubt it, but I can't say for sure.
I had ghostly lights that would appear and disappear in my basement. Freaky stuff! I decided to investigate. The next time they appeared, I froze in my tracks. I could make them “move” by moving my head back and forth. Then I realized the lights were made by a lens flare off my corneas by the light as the top of the stairwell. Mystery solved! 😂
As a glasses wearer I'm well familiar with lens flare. Sometimes I'll look at a digital clock (the ones with 7 segment LED numbers) and notice a ghost copy of the numbers that move with my head.
@@grn1 Wearing glasses or sunglasses, it's pretty easy to get tricked into thinking a reflection of something _behind you_ in the corner of the lenses is actually an object easily close to your face and moving quickly.
@@CookiesRiot I don't think I've ever experienced that and I've been wearing glasses since I was a young child. The clock thing is always when I'm looking at a clock at a slight angle, usually looking up at the clock. A similar effect sometimes happens with street lights. How clean my glasses are may also effect things.
My father told a story about the MinMin lights in Australia. He was driving the truck early in the morning between Dunedoo and Dubbo and had a light follow along beside the truck in the trees. He swore that it wasnt anything human - it wasnt hunters with a light, it wasnt the moon, it wasnt a vehichle because it crossed over a river without pausing. He just said it was an orange ball of light that was beside him for a few miles.
I think we definitely have a lot more to learn about our planet, because I'm certain these are either geological or meteorological phenomena of some kind. There are so many such sightings. I've seen one, my son has seen one - quite different in appearance, but in an area that's a bit marshy and has occasional mild earthquakes. The more people admit they've seen things like this publicly, the more come forward and say they've seen them too. I saw my orb about 20 years ago. My son knew about it, because he was there with me, but I didn't tell my husband until lockdown and have only recently started to describe what I saw online more recently. Amazing to think that what your dad saw followed him for a few miles (what I saw lasted maybe a couple of minutes, and travelled maybe 20 feet at most before it disappeared). Since I think that static electricity might be part of the answer, I wonder if it was attracted to your dad's car.
wasn't it probably just his own headlights reflected back, which is why they followed along neatly and crossed a river? as explained above? I'm pretty sure, but still love for your dad he had this magical experience, cuz of course it feels that way if something like this happens, no matter the logical explanation.
I never tell this story because I hate that I still can't explain it with science. I was 20, living in a house with 4 other students at my university. After living there for a couple months, I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a beating heart that seemed to be coming from the walls themselves, matched by a blue, pulsing light that seemed to be coming from a corner of the closet. I genuinely thought I was having some sort of mental break. I walked out of my room and the sound stopped the moment I stepped into the hallway... and then started again as soon as I went back into the room. I walked around the rest of the house, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, but it was silent. I went outside to see if there was any sort of blue light shining into my closet... but there was nothing. No moon, no street lights. I didn't wake any of my housemates because I didn't want them to think I was crazy, so I took a walk around my neighborhood. By the time I came back, the light and the sound had stopped. ...Then it happened again that next night. This time I was so distressed that I woke up one of my housemates, crying. I pleaded with them to come into my room and tell me if they heard anything or saw anything weird. As soon as they stepped into my room, their eyes went wide and they looked at me with a look of terror. They heard the heartbeat and saw the pulsing light in the closet. I was a staunch atheist at the time and hated any sort of woo-woo stuff. She was raised as a Buddhist. She sat in my room with me as we listened to this weird heartbeat and watched the pulsing light in the closet. She thought it must be the soul of some person that passed away young and was confused and stuck in this Earth realm. I was freaked out enough to just go with this explanation. She chanted for probably an hour and then it stopped. We never saw the light or heard the heartbeats again. 25 years later and nothing like that has ever happened to me again. But I'll never forget it.
Man I feel that, I don't know what it is but it's always crazy until you experience something weird yourself. Who knows what it was, but you experienced it, y'know? And it's been so long that you can't explain it. I've had some weird stuff happen too, most of the time it's explainable. Like this one time as a little kid, I ran into my room and the closet door slammed. Scared me so damn much I had a hard time going into that closet or even the room ever since then. Mostly likely, though, a window was open and I don't remember (we had AC units in some rooms but others didn't, so we would keep the windows open and that was likely the case). But then something just so damn crazy happens to you and others (which is the key thing) that you just can't write it off. One time after I was a little older, we moved to a new house. Everything was fine until all of a sudden it seems like we were being haunted. It was like something happened cause it was a new house and everything was fine and then just one day it all started happening. I'm pretty sure I was the first person to see anything, which was a shadow casted by the light of my brother's room walk into it. It was like someone walked into the room but no one was there. My parents told me that it was a person jogging outside, cause the street lights were on and there was a tiny little escape window (we slept in the basement) and so it might have been that. I called BS cause it was cast by the room light, not a tiny window light. I also saw a full body, legs moving and all, and it was against the floor, meaning the angle was the light of the room not a street light. We were walking down stairs to go brush our teeth and it was like right when I walked into the room it happened. I don't know why but whenever I think about it I always get stressed and tears start forming even though I'm not emotional about it. I was probably the most scared I ever was at that moment, and my parents didn't know what to do and just kinda wrote it off. Then they started to experience stuff, and my brothers, and then one day a few months later, it all just stopped. Just nothing. It was like a few months of putting up with it and then boom just done like it never happened. It was pretty consistent, like something happening every couple weeks, and it always was around the same area of the house, but then it just stopped. No records of it happening before as well cause we talked with the landlords and they said they hadn't heard of anything. Still bothers me just cause I got no idea other than what I saw and remember. Hell if it was just the shadow I would write it off as a kid memory that was over hyped and remembered different than how it happened and it probably was just an illusion, but then my parents and family started seeing stuff as well and that only made things worse then cause it was confirming that fear I had to be genuine. I don't like talking about it cause when people say "bro stop lying" or "nah clearly you're just falling for an illusion" it just bugs me cause- I mean you know what you see, right? I've seen stuff that I can tell is fake, and then I see stuff that I can tell is real when it comes to this, and so actually having something happen just really sets me off cause I just know what I saw and I gain nothing by lying about it, or if it was some minor thing it just wouldn't be burned into my memory and have a physical response when recalling it, y'know? Gotta be more to experience than what we can see and feel in some ways.
@@medicodyssey absolutely. There is FAR more to existence than what we perceive. We are only aware of 4 possibly 5 dimensions using our normal senses. The spacial 3 dimensions of “up, down, left/right” and time, with gravity/velocity being possibly another dimension. Mathematically, there should be at least 12(!) dimensions!! That means we aren’t even AWARE of HALF of what is going on around us. Anything that exists within other dimensions has the probability of randomly entering into and out of the dimensions that we are able to perceive and would be nearly indescribable as a result. They would behave in ways that are unnatural to us. Makes one wish for a bunch of gear that could be used to examine and experiment with the anomaly you experienced
@@medicodyssey My parents house has always had... Something, going on. I'd be downstairs alone in the house and there's be a huge crash from upstairs like someone threw a text book on the floor. Sometimes the sound of furniture scooting around. Going up to check, I'd never see anything out of place. I'd completely written this off as my overactive childhood imagination until last year. My mom brought it up at dinner, describing the exact same thing. I'd never mentioned it to her, or anyone else. She also told a story about my father thinking she was climbing into bed next to him, only to turn around and see no one was there. The house was built for them, there was no earlier structure, no history that we know of for the site. It was just woods. Very odd stuff.
I’m a pretty skeptical person in general-although, I do think there is *something* to some of the “paranormal” stuff that people experience-but I have a story of my sister’s and her friend that I still find difficult to explain to this day. We were at summer camp in the backcountry of central-western Alberta, up in the foothills of the Rockies. I’d like to preface with: my sister is an incredibly truthful and rational person. She has a childlike innocence to her, even to this day, and she has never, ever been one to make up stories. Also, I was a Jr. Leader this year along with two other young ladies, and we had our own cabin close to the wash house. So, it was the last night of camp, and my sister’s best friend was standing on the front porch of their cabin, just watching girls go from their cabins to the wash house and back. Twilight was setting in, so it was getting hard to make out details; as she stood on the porch, she noticed a tall person standing a few metres out in front of my cabin. She thought this was her Jr. Leader, and so she hopped off the porch and made her way over to talk to her. But as she drew closer, she realized how strange this figure actually was: it has elongated arms and legs, a tall, very thin body that was all beige in colour, wearing no clothes, and it had a large, elongated head, similar to an alien you might see in Star Wars. And as she got closer still, she realized that, based on the contours of the head, this thing seemed to be looking right at her-except that it had no facial features: no nose, no mouth, no eyes; nothing. She immediately turned around and hoofed it back to the cabin. After this incident m, she didn’t tell anyone, just went about her business back at the cabin. We Jr. Leaders had come back from the washroom and were doing the nightly rounds of saying good night to each cabin. When we arrived at my sister’s cabin, I found my sister huddled in a ball on her bunk, quietly crying, while this friend was comforting her and speaking to her in whispers. I asked my sister what had happened, but she just told me to go away. (*Little sisters*, I thought.) The following morning, my sister and her friend relayed to us what had happened. She’d been on top of her bunk getting changed into her pyjamas, when something caught her eye out the window. She looked up and tried to make sense of what she was seeing-initially it looked like a person, but then she realized that this thing was very tall and very thin, with a large, elongated head, with no eyes or any facial features-and she could tell it was staring right at her. We have no idea what happened to this thing between it looking in at my sister and us Jr. Leaders arriving at the cabin. As far as we know, no one but these two 11-year-old girls had seen the thing. To this day, I still cannot think of a very good reasonable explanation for what they saw. The only thing I can think of is that the youngest of the three men who were at the camp that week may have brought along some kind of alien suit and put it on to scare/spy on the girls (he was the only one of the three who was tall and lanky.) But with so many people going to and from the wash house, I would think that someone else would have seen him walking from his trailer toward the cabins; not to mention, my best friend and co-leader was his sister-in-law, and her sister would have tipped her off if he’d brought some ridiculous alien suit with him along with all the baby stuff they had to pack for their twins. In any case, both girls insisted that this figure was even skinnier than he was, and I think it’s highly unlikely that he would have done something like that anyway. Perhaps we’ll never know what it was they saw, but I do know that that area of Canada is pretty creepy.
I was in Norway, a long way north of Hessdalen, earlier this year photographing the northern lights and saw (and photographed) some unexplainable lights very very similar to the Hessdalen lights. Others out that night commented about it to me too. They were not as beautiful as the northern lights although were brighter. I think scientific explanations of natural phenomena doesn't detract from the stories, they are mysteries of our earth.
There are several other areas of Norway that have these lights all along the coast from Stavanger to Tromsø Hesdalen is just in the middle I'm no expert but it might have something to do with the fact that all along the coast of Norway you have an old really old mountain chain and it sits on the edge of the Baltic shield lots of old mineral deposits all the way up the coast So if you wear in Bodø or Tromso area that's the northern end of it Hesdalen is the best documented of the lights but as I said you'll find them all along the coast We also have here in Norway the largest known thorium mine As you know it's a low radiation mineral that actually glow blue in large concentrations really cool but a bit dangerous and we see some really wierd shit here to I live right on top of the mine So maybe there's something to do about piezoelectric and radiation in combination I don't know Just a thought Just saying 🇧🇻
One of my parents is from the Pudasjärvi region in Finland, just on the southern border of Lapland basically. Apparently there were a lot of unexplained lights/some sort of UFOs in the 1950s and 1960s (I think) at that area. Unfortunately I don't know much about this since people were rather quiet about what they might have seen, in fear of being viewed as crazy. But I did hear that my grandparents did see these moving weird lights on several occasions, but again, were reluctant to share many details. I'd love to hear more about this, I think there are a couple of old documentaries and such, but not much to go on.
My former teacher is an anthropologist who did fieldwork in one of the indigenous communities in the Amazon. One of the beliefs of this group was that a globe of light leaves the body after death. My teacher obviously doesn't believe in these things, but on one of the days she was there, a member of the community had died, and as it was getting dark, the community members asked everyone to go back to their tents, so that the spirit would not be disturbed during its passage. Coincidentally or not, when my teacher returned to her tent, around 18 : 00 PM, she saw a globe of light coming from where the body was resting and left towards the forest. She herself said that there are things that cannot be explained by our science during these fieldworks, but within these communities they are part of everyday life, and that when we visit them, we must ignore everything we think we know and open ourselves to experiences.
I love stories like this Joe. We saw a blue ball flash outside our house once. Both my wife and I saw it. We always figured it was ball lightening but a ghost story is way more fun :) Appreciate all your work Joe!
I'm so glad you covered this topic. I live in the Blue ridge area and live a couple minutes away from Brown Mountain. I always loved hearing people's stories about them around October. I had no clue that there was other places and stories of this phenomenon.
I'm so happy that you mentioned the Paulding lights I've experienced them and it was so mysterious and beautiful. Even if it's just car lights. I will say you stand at a weird slant when viewing and that very well could add to the illusion. But that part of your brain that is full of mystery and bewilderment takes over. You can definitely get those spooky vibes while watching.
this video reminded me of a story my mother told us at a few occasions. It was a story known in her village and I can't remember now, but I think the person it happened to she knew, or knew indirectly. He stayed late in another village, because of work or celebration, and although asked to sleep over he decided to head home taking a shortcut through the forest at night. He saw a light above ground moving and thinking it to be a person with a lantern called out to it, asking to join it through the forest. It waited for him. So he followed the light. The story goes that he was lead all around the forest until morning and when the sun came up the light was no more. There was no one there. He came home with his clothes all torn from getting caught in thorns and branches. I always remember that one when there's talk of mysterious lights.
Sounds like a made up story, no one follows lights around a forest all night if they are getting led through areas where they get injured . Sounds like folklore.
That was a really great video! Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy making it, it had a really great classic Answers with Joe vibe. But maybe that was music/pacing/writing, idk exactly. Was really happy to see you shout out wendigoon, his brown mountain lights video was phenomenal!
I camped on Brown Mountain (Linville Gorge) and saw a blue light. It appeared right by my head outside of my tent around 12am. I couldn’t sleep so it startled me when it showed up. Our camping spot was enclosed by the mountain side and dense forest, a very isolated spot. The parking lot was much lower in elevation and it would not have been possible for someone’s flashlight to have shined through much less headlights. I’d be curious of what it was. It was floating in one place for more than one minute then collapsed in on itself. It floated about a foot off the ground and was about the size of a softball. The light was dense and bright. It illuminated some of the area around it, including the inside of my tent. But not so bright that I couldn’t look at it. I’d imagine if it was gas that it would move/dissipate outward. Not gonna lie, it scared me a little bit.
Weird I had a similar experience, but I was indoors and the orb was more like a shadow in my case. My friend saw it too which is the only reason I can believe it actually happened. The orb appeared by my head and then shot off into a mirror when I looked at it. I looked at my friend and he just said, “Did you see that?” As we were flabbergasted as to what happened, we realized a jacket was swinging on the wall and wouldn’t stop. We ran out of there and didn’t go back
Similar experience to yours, but we were indoors and the ball lightning was outside. We were also among trees so couldnt have been cars. The moon was on the other side of the house. It lasted no more than a few seconds but came out of the sky and flew at the door we were standing behind. We xould see it out the window
I was so excited to see this video and was slightly disappointed because my experience didn’t really fit in with the solutions. Something else happened and I’m open to find out what it was.
It really is crazy that so many people have experiences like this. I always told my cousin the story and one day he ran into my friend that witnessed it with me. My friend told my cousin they exact same story, so I think my cousin mostly believes me now.
What a unique experience to share with another! I believe you. Who knows what it could have been. It’s fun to wonder. I tell my story every now and again and I get some funny looks haha but it’s okay. I know our experiences are unique and the answers are still out there somewhere.
If there were only a few things to spoil before all the mystery in life was gone, it would be a shame to do so and thus lose that mystery. But in my experience with every step exploring a mystery or scientific question, leads to knew mysteries with as much awe and wonder as we could ever wish to appreciate. Thanks so much to those role models in my life that helped me learn this lesson early. In other words, you spoiled very little for us eager learners and have done a great job opening our minds to new wonders. So thanks Joe!
I saw one myself long ago in Northern California up above Middletown in the mountains. My girlfriend and I were staying in a cabin and there was a fierce storm. Wind, rain, and all of the trees around the cabin created an interesting symphony of sounds that night as we tried to sleep. Outside was an orchard on one side and forest on all other sides. On the orchard side it was all knee deep mud all the way to the main road, about 300 yards and luckily there was a gravel road on the other side of the cabin that wrapped around the orchard that met the road about half a mile south of the cabin. Out the bedroom window was a view of the other side of the orchard where it met the forest. There were taps and creeks, and scratches as the branches of trees brushed against the cabin along with the howling of the wind and the pouring of the rain onto this cabin, which was built pretty well actually. I couldn't really get to sleep and kept having strange dreams in a semi-sleeping/waking state because of all of the noise. My head was right next to the wall of the cabin and all of the sudden I heard four distinct taps in perfect time right by my head. It really got my attention since everything else was randomly spaced out. Immediately after the four taps was a scratching sound like someone took a branch on the outside of the cabin, right where my head was and dragged it slowly along the side of the cabin, in the direction towards the orchard side, where the window was on the adjoining wall. This was about 20 feet, and it was slow and continuous and this really got my attention since it followed a very unusual series of taps right next to my head. Just then I saw a light flashing across the window. I immediately shot up out of bed. My girlfriend was snoring. I tried to wake her up but she was fast asleep and I had no time to spare. I ran over to the window to see a light that was soft white, like a flashlight. I thought to myself, "who the heck could be out there in that storm, and they are surely going to get stuck in the mud out there, as I watched the light dance around about 30 or so feet out in the orchard, bobbing up and down and weaving through the trees. A few seconds later it took off through the orchard as I watched it move 300 or so yards in a matter of seconds, and then I realized it wasn't a person with a flashlight, it was something else. This was before drones and the wind was howling anyways, and the rain was pouring down... I continued to look into the blackness of the night through that window with intense curiosity, my heart pounding and my mind racing to make a logical connection as to what it was, as the light was now across the road making it's way quickly up the mountain on the other side, faster than anything could move through the terrain. My heart was racing now as I wondered what the heck the thing was. Afterwards I laid there awake wondering as I listened once again to the symphony of random sounds against that old cabin, eventually dozing off to sleep. Something was checking on us in there, but it didn't feel threatening... although I certainly wasn't going to go outside and chase after the thing, I wouldn't have been able to move that fast through the mud anyways. It seemed to be a point of soft-white light, about the size of a baseball, that moved in continuous motion weaving it's way through the trees. There was no lightning or thunder that night, nor the following day, and there was no accompanying noises with the light, other than the initial four distinct taps on the outside of the cabin wall right where my head was that jolted my senses to wide awake by their distinct difference from the normally random sounds everywhere, and then the continuous scratching sound that shot me up in the bed moving my attention to the window at the far wall in the room. Ball lighting again? I don't know...
I live on the 6th floor in Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Long back, when I was 11, from my living room I could see weird lights. They were single yellow dots, appeared at the exact same point, appeared constantly through the night, the interval between them was irregular and the duration of each instance was irregular too. It seemingly appeared from inside a mangrove forest. I was fascinated but frustrated that I couldn't find out what they were. I asked my dad and he thought it must be light blinking from a mobile tower. But I wasn't convinced because of the irregular duration and frequency. I scratched my head for over a year probably. Then one night while I was at my friend's flat on the 9th floor, I finally figured out. Of course, they were car headlights. It was a section of a State Highway. For a brief moment on that section, you would be travelling towards our building, before taking a sharp left turn. Since there were mangroves in front of it, most of the road wasn't visible except for that section (which probably had a tree missing). The irregular duration was because of cars travelling at different speeds and the irregular intervals was because, obviously cars don't travel at perfect intervals from each other. Because they were mangroves (thus short trees), going up to the 9th floor was enough to see over them and at the entire road.
Honestly, even if there's no magic or ghosts involved, it is still fascinating how these lights can be seen in other places than where they were initially caused "simply" by the right conditions of warm air flow. I personally have always been interested in fatamorganas and it doesn't get less interesting just because you explain how they work ☺️
As physicist Richard Feynman said: "I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."
I live in Norway and in 2019 I went with some friends to see the Hessdalen lights. We camped for 2 nights near the visitor centre there, didn't see anything the first night, but was lucky enough to see it the 2nd. It was a lot brighter than I thought and moved slowly parallell to us like 20-30m over the treeline. It only lasted around 5-10 minutes before it kind of faded and at the same time went downwards closer to the treetops where we couldn't see it anymore from our vantage point. The interesting thing I remember from this experience was how fast it appeared. We were in the car listening to music and just talking, when one of us just noticed it had appeared and we went outside to look at it. It didn't slowly fade into existence, one moment it wasn't there, the next moment it was.
In the mid 80s When I was about 15, I was with two friends walking home at night in the UK's north and a silent glowing orb drifted by above our heads - from memory I recall it appeared to be only about 10-20m away and maybe beachball sized and within a few seconds it was gone. We turned to each other and said "you did see that right?" -- but after that night we never really discussed it and have since moved our separate ways. Looking back at that, often after watching something like this video to remind me, I'm convinced that it must have been some kind of electrical phenomona -- there was an electricity substation and pylons only about 100m away. Perhaps some kind of plasma ball could form in perfect conditions from the spark of a power surge or other trigger. Then slowly drifting by and dissipating, like our youth. Dammit. lol
I was saddened when my brother and I experienced the Marfa Lights firsthand and figured what we were seeing must be headlights. It seemed implausible because looking on the map where HWY67 is, it seemed like it was too far away to be seen from where we were (should have been below the horizon), but the regular pattern they took over time told us there had to be some odd atmospheric phenomenon happening we weren’t aware of. I’m thankful to you for providing the superior mirage explanation. I should also note that my sister-in-law, who was with us at the time and had spent many a night in her college days hanging out out there with friends, agreed that what we were seeing were just headlights, though that didn’t explain a handful of sightings she’d had of much more randomly behaved lights located closer. She claims the alcohol didn’t have anything to do with it either…
There are plenty of things still truly unknown with little to no proper explanation that capture our imagination. I love when you explore those topics as well as the crazy stuff like your earlier videos that just shows how far we've come... or not as a society.
Saw 3 glowing orbs come out of the woods and float across the road in front of us. Was in remote GA, in a VERY rural area on a single car dirt lane, not near other road or anything else. Known area that locals know abt. We tried to find a source. They just floated around, then went back and floated randomly around in the woods, curving around trees and...headstones. it's an old rural graveyard that is deep in woods and overgrown. I LOVE old graveyards.
I haven't seen any of the lights described, but I did see something similar in Quebec. I was at my family lake house and I saw individual red, green and yellow lights moving around the horizon incredibly fast, the whole time they move in straight lines that would stop and immediately change directions, they didn't have any trails and they just disappeared after a few minutes. No idea what could cause that, it was daytime and there wasn't any planes nearby.
My wife has seen ball lightning once as a teen. It was actually INDOORS during a storm and freaked her out a bit! She lived in the Western mountains of NC so it lines up with other incidents of ghost lights.
Just outside of Crossett, Arkansas there is a floating orb that has been there for as long as anyone can remember. I've seen it on a half dozen or so different occassions, as did all the people that were with me. It's something that everyone in the area knows about. The headlight explanation doesn't sound plausible because it's in the middle of nowhere and the area is surrounded by pine trees. It always seemed to be less that 10 feet from the ground so if it was headlights then the trees would break it up. Its on a small strech of dirt road and you never know if it's going to appear in front of or behind you, or if it'll be on the left or right side. Ball lightning would make more sense but I've heard more than a few accounts of it passing through vehicles. That could all be bullshit but because its been there for so long and has been seen by so many people; the fact that no one has figured out exactly what it is is kind of wild Edit: changed "swamp gases" to "ball lightning"
Seen a similar phenomenon back in 2001 while driving with my dad road tripping through Mexico. More specifically this happened somewhere several hours south of the Arizona border, in the middle of nowhere practically. It was a group/fleet of about a dozen red/orange orbs. At first I assumed they were fireworks being lit in the distance up above some mountains (this was a few days before Mexican Independence Day). I started paying more attention after these “fireworks” weren’t exploding but seemed to be doing some sort of choreographed routine. They would transition between moving independently from one another to moving in precise formations as if all part of a larger whole. When moving in formation, the would hold a few different positions like a big equilateral triangle or a “flying-v” like formation. It was fascinating because there was a noticeable difference in their “gait” (for lack of a better word) between these two modes. When moving as individuals they had this awkward (almost dopey) bobbing and swaying which may have been from wind but was not noticeable when in the other mode. These things were without a doubt intelligently controlled in some way. Not saying it was aliens or anything like that. I still have no idea. All I know is that they were the eeriest thing I’ve ever witnessed personally. And for what it’s worth, my dad has refused to talk about what we saw that night all these years later. So there’s that.
@@ROVA00 Oh yeah I guess I did forget to mention this was several hundred feet in the air above some mountains. I mean it’s still possible this was an elaborate optical illusion. I wish I could have recorded this somehow. It’s really hard to convey anything accurately without having something to point to and say “here… please explain this to me”
@@SmokeyChipOatley Not to try and unmystify it for you, but honestly, it doesn't soundthat elaborate after having watched this video. It seems to happens quite often, even from upwards of 20-30km away. Your experience sounds just like if various air currents were swirling about somewhere, somehow, maybe over the mountains, sometimes bobbling along the wind generally together and other times some turbulence comes along and knocks the individual lights around. Also, a long line of cars slowly moving across the landscape full of triangular mountains sounds like a good explanation for how the v-formations came along. The more I think about this the more it makes sense to me.
@@kindlin That's just dumb. What a weird mental contortion, "oh it must've been air currents swirling over the mountains, and that fact that some mountains look like triangles means it's cars". The explanation given in this video is a big stretch when it comes to a lot of sightings. I'm sure it explains some of the specific ones in this video, but it can't be applied to all similar phenomena. These kinds of sightings are not totally uncommon, they happen around the world. Lights that alternate between moving independently and in formation. I don't know what they are either, but they do seem to act intelligently.
To once again quote the writtings of the great Sir Terry Pratchett: "Just because you know how the magic is done, doesn't mean it stops being magical" and "Isn't it enough to see that the garden is beautiful, without having to imagine fairies hiding at the bottom?"
I saw something when I was young. My only ghost-like experience. I was in bed and saw a light blue orb, about the size of a softball, maybe a little bigger, just hovering over the foot of my bed, about 3-4 feet up. I laid there with the covers pulled up just under my eyes, staring at it until I fell asleep. I don't remember being scared, more curious with maybe a slight bit of concern. It was along the same part of my room as the window, so couldn't have been light coming in from outside, and I don't remember ever having some sort of nightlight or anything that could have projected a sphere shape onto the wall. Never saw anything like that again. I never thought that much of it until I had a teacher in middle school talk about the same sort of thing, which piqued my interest and I found out a lot of people have seen similar things.
Saw three of these with a friend late at night on a college campus. They were travelling quite fast through the campus grounds maneuvering around buildings and trees. After that, we both had occasional "visits" of blue light flashes that would come from empty/impossible places above and behind us. Later that year my friend saw another three late at night in the suburbs of Chicago. Kinda glad we haven't seen them or been visited in a long time
My father chased a random light through a cornfield one night. I was around 9 or 10 at the time and my mother was in the car with us, me in the back seat. The light changed color almost in the way bubbles form on top of a boiling pot. The colors were blue, green, yellow and red and blinked, or boiled in no particular order. It moved fast across the field and eventually disappeared out of sight. That's about all that I remember, other than my mother screaming, "It went that way!"
You know, just because you know what causes a rainbow and may be able to make one yourself with a hose, doesn't mean you can't enjoy the pretty light in the sky.
Even explained as mirage of car lights it doesn't lose its weirdness. It just shows that conventional physics may produce in rare circumstances really spooky effects. Very nice video. Quite frankly my favourite are those where some uncanny mystery gets finally resolved.
When on the water, we have often seen the horizon reflected and stretched in such a way that when we look towards shore, we see towering cliffs, or spires - but it's just the distortion of the shore or houses along the shoreline.
For me this video doesn’t ruin the lights but makes them even more magical by knowing how they function it’s so incredibly intriguing and magical to me to learn the truth about something that at first glance seems mystical and unexplainable It really gives since of wonder watching physics in work
I think I've been chased by min min lights when I was a child... It was freaky. Walking along a bush track at night with my brothers, a light appeared down the track and came rushing towards us. We started running and the light flew over our heads a couple of meters above us, continued down the track for a bit then disappeared. It made no sound and we don't have any kind of glow bugs in this part of Australia. Never seen anything like it since.
I’ve been to Marfa during the Marfa Lights Festival and got to see them. They looked exactly like car headlights. As for the chasing lights, we have to remember that once a cop was chasing a light that was zipping around in the sky. After miles of pursuit he finally got a clear view and realized it was the moon. His turning and going around curves made him think the light was moving instead of his car.
My dad worked at a furniture and gift store here in outback QLD. The guy bought a few things and then asked if my dad wanted his works of books. The books included old bush remedies and recipes, but one that I read a few times was campfire stories which included a few stories of ghost lights. Entering homes or staying in paddocks until investigated Spooked the shit out of 8yr old me
The best "light in the sky" experience I ever had was driving a rural highway at night near Whanganui, New Zealand. A big, bright and very green meteor flew right across our direction of travel before burning out in a handful of pieces. It couldn't have been more than a few km away, judging by the clarity and intensity of the flickering. I found it especially interesting knowing what it almost certainly was, rather than fearing some fantastic hooey. I guess we could figure out what it was mostly composed of from the colour.
Where exactly were you near when driving along Whanganui? This is important... can't say why on here. Maybe I would message you but I need to know the area first.
@@ctaigawhanau Main road, SH3, Eastbound. The object was going north. One of those straight flat stretches across the tops. I don't know the road well enough to be more precise. We were on our way back to Wellington from somewhere - not sure whether it was NP, Hawera or just Whanganui. I couldn't even tell you which side of Whanganui it was, sorry. Not without trawling through streetview or driving the road again at least. If there's a particular date you're interested in, I could at least say yea or nay whether it was a possibility. Did it set your hay barn on fire or something?
My grandmother lived in Quapaw, Oklahoma, so I've been out to see what Joe called the "Ozark Spooklight" many times. To locals, it's just the Spooklight. I've seen it twice. Apparently, some people DO mistake car headlights for it, but that's not what I saw. Car headlights don't move around in nearby treetops; however, what I saw might have been produced by piezoelectricity. The ground there is loaded with minerals. None of that explains what I've heard from locals, though. Many claimed to have seen it at a distance of less than six feet, and some reported "intelligent behavior" from it. That is, it came close to them and darted away when they moved towards it. One of my mom's friends, who lived all her life on Devil’s Promenade, claimed that when she was a kid, the light developed a habit of showing up while she was waiting for the school bus. She wasn't afraid of it. She had accepted it as normal from birth. She said it was company. Everyone who lived up in that region, my grandmother included, was very matter-of-fact about it. They regarded the light as if it were mundane. They weren't curious. They didn't repeat folklore. They didn't care what it was. It was as natural as a patch of wildflowers to them.
I've wondered about the piezoelectric effect causing the Brown Mountain lights. Ultra-pure quartz, for semiconductors, is mined nearby and there is another old quarry where the quartz for Palomar Telescope was mined. For my own part, I saw some mysterious lights when I was standing of the back dock of a manufacturing plant near Asheville, NC. They were small and intense leaving a slight trail behind them as they moved slowly parallel to the horizon. I thought they were landing lights from the airport, but then one moved in front of a grove of trees. I saw five or six and then the power went out causing damage to the plant's power systems that took months to repair. The two would seem to be connected, but the lights were floating freely in the air and not connected electrical equipment.
My dad saw the Min Min lights in the '80s, driving a truck in far-east Western Australia on the Nullarbor. There's a train line close by and parallel to the road. He said it followed alongside his truck near the train line, where there was a stationary freight train. The lights then rose up, went ahead, went down to ground level behind the train and stayed lit for a while. There was no one else around and if you understand the Nullarbor you understand how devoid of people it is. He couldn't explain it.
The same happened with my father in law in the 60’s. He claimed to have had a race with the Min min lights along the Nullarbor. The light won the race. He did mention that it wasn’t the first time that he had seen the lights, but he has since passed on so there is no way to ask him.
Despite knowing the truth, Marfa and the viewing center are absolutely worth the visit. It is incredibly beautiful out there and something so peaceful about looking out to the horizon and seeing the lights bounce around. Would recommend.
I always wanted to experience a full blown fata morgana! I've only ever seen the wiggly air, the "wet" looking roads and cars throwing 4 shadows. I'd love to see some of these!
Are you sure you want to see it? Because if you ever do you'll be really freaked out and be seen by your friends and even family as 'crazy.' Beware of what you wish for.
Hey Joe, first time seeing your channel, but a friend sent me this video because of a story I've always told people from my childhood: I grew up in Hawaii and when I was 12 or 13 or so, I was in my kitchen at around 7pm-8pm, washing my hands in the sink after eating dinner. While looking out the window, I saw some light illuminating our neighbor's house. Our houses were about only 30 feet from each other, and we had a solid wood fence between us, so I could see light being cast on the side of his house, but I couldn't see the source of the light. I figured that my neighbor was in his yard with a flashlight walking back and forth, as the light source moved left to right quickly. However after a few seconds, the source of the light came OVER our fence- It looked like a bright blue fireball. It moved around in my small backyard area and moved back and forth, floating about 5 feet from the ground, and moving in an almost figure-8 pattern, and was about 5 feet in front of me. It was about the size of a basketball, and it gave off a shimmering effect, kind of like it was made of fire. I remember tiny pieces of the fireball sort of breaking off and dissipating instantly (search on google image "pixels breaking" and that first picture of the robot disintegrating is sort of how I would describe it). The fireball reminded me of a chi blast from Dragon Ball Z, or something, and almost teardrop shaped. Anyways, this thing flew around my yard for about 10 seconds, moving back and forth without bumping into any walls or our fence, before it flew to the left of the window, and out of sight. I ran out into my yard to see where it went, but I couldn't find where it went. After a second I thought to myself: "wtf am I doing chasing this thing?!" and ran back inside. In Hawaii there's folklore surrounding the fireballs, as well. They're called "Akualele" and the reasonings vary from ghosts/spirits, to hostile spells being cast by "Kahuna," which is like a Hawaiian version of a shaman. So I personally don't ascribe to the theory that these ghost lights, at least the one I saw, were caused by car lights refracted from large distances, or swamp gasses, as there are no swamps or even water sources nearby (my house was a couple miles inland from the ocean). The other theories involving plasma or electricity seems possible, but I know even things like ball lightning aren't well documented since they're so rare. Anyways, that's my story :)
My mom and aunt grew up in 1960s Joplin, MO. My mom went to the location where the spook light was seen the most, but didn't see anything. However, my aunt went out there several times and on one occasion the light chased her and her friends.
I grew up in the Joplin/ Neosho/ Eureka Springs area, and heard tales about the "Spook Light." My sister sought it out and said it flew through her car one night. My mom also saw ball lightning a few times. Near Waco, MO.
I went to college in Arkansas & saw both the Gurdon Lights & the Smead Lights. Both are ghost lights situated along abandoned railroad tracks, & pretty close to one another (50-75 miles apart maybe?) but while the Gurdon Lights are in fairly close proximity to I-30, the Smead Lights are in the middle of BF, Nowhere, & sometimes appear to chase you. Pretty sure it's two completely different phenomenon that developed convergent folklore involving a railroad worker with a lantern looking for his head. ✌🏼
This is interesting… informative and entertaining as usual, Joe! I'm not a Texan, though I live in Texas, a place I'm not relaly fond of in many way, and don't worry, you did not ruin the magic of the world for me. I love science and have studied it as a correction for damaging and stupid superstitions all my life. Still, though I've read several books that try to explain the Marfa Lights as you have here, my actual experience, the testimony of my sense differs and cannot so easily be dismissed. When we watched the Marfa Lights, some of them were a lot closer than those hills in the distance, and they could be seen simply rising up out of the ground, or going down into the ground. They sometimes changed colors, split apart, combined, and were sometimes both higher than those hills (your mirage idea) but also, much closer and far lower. Some of the closest we saw appeared distinctly as orbs, not just indistinct light. Though we did see some traffic tinkling up on that highway, what we witnessed was quite distinct from those headlights and tail lights and behaved in ways that your explanation doesn't fit well. We took photos and videos. Thanks! - BPG
I was born and raised in San Antonio. I met and married a woman who was raised in Alpine Texas. I moved to Alpine Texas in 2011 after the military and I've never been to the Marfa lights. Never saw a reason to go, but people here do love their folk lore about the Marfa lights. My wife and I are people who think horse not zebra when we hear hooves. I actually once said they were head lights from cars coming up from Presidio Texas.
Wow, Joe, you've inspired a lot of people to tell their stories about strange lights. Thank you. My story is pretty simple. I've tried to find out what it could have been but can only speculate. This was in the late '90s when I was commuting from Madison, Wisconsin to our farm along the Wisconsin River. On the outskirts of Madison, I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank. When I finished, as I was headed back to my car, I looked up and saw something very strange. It's hard to describe. The sky was heavily overcast and I saw a light in the sky moving towards me from the southwest. It appeared to be just below the clouds and I thought it was a low aircraft at first. But the light was moving much too fast to be an aircraft and seemed much too slow to be a meteor. As it got closer (it took only a few seconds) it appeared to be across the highway and moving more or less parallel with it. However, the light wasn't steady (like a car headlight). It went in a straight line but appeared to be bouncing about. It was far brighter than a car headlight. There was no sound. I've no doubt that there's a logical explanation - just none I can think of.
Haven’t started this video yet, but I did see a glowing orb of light one time in Salt Lake City come shooting down out of the mountain range and then swoop back up into some scattered clouds miles away like a Nike swoosh motion. Whole thing was only maybe 2 seconds long Edit: I saw it twice actually, the above comment was the second time. The first time I saw it was out of the corner of my eye shooting into the mountain range, as opposed to coming out the second time. It was a cloudless night
Knowing is better than not knowing. And if there was a such a thing near me, I'd totally go see them even knowing there's a mundane explanation Also, the ghost stories that grow up around these are fun!
Me and a buddy saw ball lightning one time at Crescent Lake in Southington CT. We were on a res ride when a ball of light that was bigger than his car popped up in the middle of the water, then disappeared. Then another one came and went. Then another came and moved over the water in the same direction we were driving for a short distance with a buzzing sound as it went. It was really wild. Never saw em before or since. If it were not for the fact that we both saw it, I might have suspected that it was the drugs. We are both nerds, so we assumed there was an atmospheric anomaly that we couldn't explain. Still, so darn cool.
I personally think knowing how and why this happens is way more interesting than just knowing the folklore. You are seeing science in action. Which means you can repeat the experiment in other places. It might take some modeling, but it sounds cool. Awesome topic, thank you.
"As is often the way when you understand the true nature of something, then that's all the more reason to revere it." - Prof. Brian Cox comparing our ancestors' worshipping of the Sun to modern science's understanding of it.
These are some of my favourite phenomena, because they are pretty well documented. People are definitely seeing something, it’s definitely not “aliens” or “ghosts” but it is “something”
I saw one myself. I would most def. call it alien. I don't know if extraterresial/UFO kind of thing... but it wasn't from this reality for sure. It's even hard to explain it with our (human) words, you would have see it yourself to understand.
My friend and I were sitting in his car about 500 feet away from this field where he told me about a "ghost" he saw. I didn't believe him, but all of the sudden an orange ball of light about the size of a musk melon appeared for a few seconds and then turned into a flowing, glowing, white light that hovered along the ground for another few seconds, slightly longer than the original light, that was in the shape of a long victorian women's dress. There was nothing unusual about the area this happened, just a regular grass field in rural ohio. Still only saw this or any similar phenomenon once in my life.
I honestly love this myth busting videos! As some one who was raised SUPER religious and therefore told to "just believe" the unbelievable, I find myself today feeling a great sense of calm when the truth is revealed using science, math, logic, and reason! Thanks Joe!
I'm Australian, when I was a kid my aboriginal friend told me about the time a ball of light followed his family through the bush, his parents told me to never go near the lights, it still gives me chills
I haven't seen ghost lights but I did see a rather spectacular display of silent, moving lights in one area of the sky one night in Tucson, Arizona. I couldn't tell how far vs. how large they were. I watched for a looooong time, fixing on them until I just couldn't anymore. Eventually I realized that they were in the direction of the Air Force base there... so, probably a night time drone practice.
Camping last year, I saw what looked like a flaming comet. What threw me off was that it was slower moving and I could clearly see flames. Probably this same phenomenon described in the video (reflection off a distant campfire or something) but it was a really odd thing to experience.
"It's just an illusion, a trick, a trick of the light what you now see is really out of sight It's dark, it's evil, possessive and kind Something that you give me keeps me alive Both ends burning, burning so bright tonight And my world keeps turning, turning inside out And I can't break the chain I've gotta break the chain I'm trying to break the chain God help me break the chain" Awesome as always
I think it’s amazing that people saw something fascinating and wanted to try to figure out how it works and what it is. That some people have devoted parts of their life to answering the mystery is also incredible. And now you get to make a video on it and share it all with us. ❤
The only weird lights in the sky I've ever seen were definitely Northern Lights on the rare times they've been visible at my latitude. I _have_ seen the "hey, that boat looks like it's several meters above Lake Erie" thing. Sometimes you just can't tell where exactly the horizon is, either.
I used to live in Isaan, Thailand. And I have been to that festival and seen the lights (not at the festival though). I guess the reason why these lights dont have a "scary" folklore around it is that its very obvious when you see them that it is some sort of natural phenomenon. Just the way they behave seems like how lights would behave if there were some gasses or electrical disturbance etc.
I used to see an orb of light that would fly over my head occasionally when I would get out of my car to close the gate to my property in East Texas on my way to work really early in the morning. I was out in the sticks on a country road surrounded by thick forest with nobody else around so car headlights don't make sense.
When I was about 5 yrs old in South Texas my mother, aunt and younger cousin watched a huge fireball roar slowly across the sky one night- we still talk about it this day… I was too young to know whether it was reported in the local papers, I assume it was … this would have been around 1973 give or take a year… any Texans out there recall this? It was awesome 🤩
This is a great topic for @TheWhyFiles - a channel on youtube that really stands out and researches strange phenomenon and ghosts etc. Worth checking out and heck, you guys could collaborate! I'd actually love to see something like that.
This happened in 2016, but it is burned into my memory forever. I was at the Washington county fair in Minnesota, close to the dining pavilion at just after dusk when I saw a soft glowing white orb the size of a soccer ball slowly floating past about three feet in front of me and about three feet above the concession stand that I was standing next to. It was a perfect orb that just slowly floated in a straight path from my right to my left, passing less than ten feet from me as it went overhead. It was probably going about three or four miles per hour, so I could have followed it at a walking pace, but I just watched it float away down the row of concession stands.
I've seen a roughly basketball sized one, light blue in color, hovering about 7 feet from me roughly a foot off the ground. Did yours have holes or dark spots on its surface? Edit: added "or dark spots" since it was night, so it could have been holes or dark spots, i couldnt tell.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
My grandmother was terrified of what she called "Old Red Eyes." On a clear winter night on their farmhouse, two glowing red orbs shined menacingly and even seemed to blink. They weren't always there, she said, and mostly came in autumn and winter, when spirits mingled with the living world, and the wind would howl with the cries of Old Red Eyes. She swore it was a devil haunting her after she lost a child, or even that, since it was coming from the direction of the cemetery where the toddler was buried, that it was the soul of the child himself, angry at her for following a doctor's bad advice that directly led to the boy's death.
As a gullible child with a big brother who LOVED to prank me, seeing Old Red Eyes when we'd visit in winter had me terrified to the point where I refused to sleep in any room with a window that faced the eyes. My no-nonsense grandfather finally had enough. He put me and my brother in the car and drove toward the "eyes." In no time, I realized that they were simply a couple of radio towers in the next county over, so distant that they normally fell below the treeline. In summer, the treeline blocked the red lights on the top of the towers, but in autumn the leaves fell, and if the wind blew just right, then the lights "winked" in and out of visibility through the trees. The howling was simply due to the direction of the wind blowing between two sheds on the property. He had apparently tried for DECADES to explain this to my grandmother, but she was extremely superstitious and refused to accept it... until the farmer who owned the treeline cut down some of the trees, exposing the entire radio tower with all of its red lights.
My earliest memory was lying in my crib, terrified of the pulsing red eye staring in at me from outside the window as the red light atop a radio tower steadily pulsed. I could feel is staring right through me. Its cold clear malice was tangible. It tasted like blood and tears.
I would cry out and my mother would come, but she could not understand my pre-verbal gestures. It was coming for me. It can still give me chills to think of that feeling.
A decade and a half later I understood instantly what it meant to be seen by the eye of Sauron when I first read Tolkien.
Last winter, when all the leaves fell from the trees, I was on my way home and saw the full moon straight down the road through the trees. I went to band practice on the same night each week. A week later I was on my way home, and saw the full moon again! The third week, I saw it again. And it dawned on me that there is only one full moon each month, and it wouldn’t be in the same spot each time either. Come to find out, it was a new water tower built a few miles up the road with a spotlight on it. I can’t believe I was so easily fooled, but it was a learning experience.
It’s interesting how creepy red tower lights can be. We had a tower in the mountains above the city to warn planes landing in the nearby airport. I remember watching the slow pulsing red light far off on the mountain as a kid growing up and being creeped out by it, especially by the slow rhythmic way it would shut off and come on, it felt light an ominous robotic alien watching us.
Thats a great story!
i loved your story, thank you for sharing
I saw the Marfa lights one time back in the 80s while attending a church camp in the area. This was before the lights became a tourist attraction.
A group of us stopped along the highway and watched them for at least half an hour. Whatever we saw, it wasn’t headlights from cars. The lights were many different colors blue, yellow, red. Even changing colors. Each light moved on its own independently from the others, not in a pattern like you’d expect from cars following the road.
We saw them move on freely left, right, up, and down. They even moved closer towards us and then back farther away. Some lights would split into two then reform with another light. And some didn’t move at all. They would dim out then reappear in the same spot sometimes.
The research teams may have observed headlights but I really don’t think they saw the same lights we saw.
Never saw ghost lights, but I remember as a young kid being spooked by the way passing traffic would distort and stretch the shadows on my walls at night. Probably didn't help that our Mom told us our place was haunted. Thanks Mom.
why would you ever tell your children that your house is haunted? seems like quite a mean thing to do to your child. youre just giving them a reason to be scared in your home where they should feel the safest. >.
@@SpydersByte Well if the house is haunted you should tell your kids and give them some age appropriate training on how to deal with it. Don't anger the spirits, always be polite, don't open the red door etc.
No reason a house can't have odd shadows caused by car headlights, and be haunted they aren't mutually exclusive.
@@SpydersByte Yep, I don't believe it's possible to get parenting right 100% of the time, but she would have saved me years of doing 10 yard midnight sprints to the bathroom if she'd kept all that nonsense to herself.
This is better than Joe's video, but it wouldn't have happened without Joe. Hmm, orbs can't happen without car headlights.
Keep up the good work, and keep your ghost stories to yourself, that's scary ship!
As a kid I was sure that the house was haunted by a pair of disembodied shoes (see The Wearing of the Grin, Looney Tunes 1951 for context) and would hear it running about at night. I was terrified of this thing until one day I saw the cat scratching behind an ear with it's hind foot while sitting on the linoleum in the front passage and realised that was the source of the disembodied running feet I had heard so many times. 😂
My dad once almost had a heart attack when he spotted a bright blue ball of light chasing his car through a particularly thick fog. Just when he was on the verge of wetting his car seat, he realized there was a railroad parallel to the road and the light was some kind of electric arc caused by ice crystals on the power line as the train was passing
Parallel train tracks with a dark country road can be insanely disorienting. I never experienced it until about 2 years ago driving through rural Texas. It seemed I was absolutely going to be hit by the train at a crossing I could not see. I ended up stopped in the middle of the road standing outside my car to get perspective. 😅
Lmao 💀 i got a new idea
Your dad 100% wet that seat, don't let him tell you any different, lol
he saw 'Ball lightning' it's a real thing
As for the "lights following you" part, my wife tells the story of when she was a little girl and one night on the beach, she saw a carpet of silver over the waves in the sea going straight to the moon, which was low on the horizon. She says she walked along the beach and the carpet kept following her. And, indeed, it does, and there is nothing particularly mysterious about it, but for her it was magic and she still remembers it.
There are a lot of strange aspects to the 'ghost lights' that are not properly explained by modern science or folklore , like the Brown Mt. lights which are not flashlights, cars, mirages or reflections, and unlikely to even be UFO's.
I don't think it's being a wet blanket, nor should anyone feel bad about resolving a mystery. Finding out the actual explanation is fun, interesting and a great way to learn. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
I find the folklore aspect and the scientific explanations of things like this equally fascinating. It doubles the fun in my opinion.
Also, understanding a phenomenon can help predict when it will happen, so more people can get to experience it first hand. We all know why solar eclipses happen, but that doesn't detract from the amazing spectacle - that we can predict centuries in advance.
@@glitchedoom We've been using folklore and mythology to explain the holes in scientific knowledge for literally thousands of years.
The Greeks explained weather and mountains and time with Gods, we're still doing it today with "ghosts" and "aliens". The interesting part is that the more we know scientifically, the smaller the holes that need to be filled with folklore. We went from saying mountains were made by Gods to a moving light being ghosts. Makes me wonder how small we can go before we just abandon that idea. Folklore is ingrained in us as a species, I don't think folklore will ever go away, but it's being used for increasingly tiny things. The more we discover, the less we need to make up.
I love the fact that it is science in action.
Wet blankets are great in the summer time heat when your AC is broke.
I saw a large glowing dome that seemed to be about 50 feet away in the woods shortly after dark. My buddy saw it too. We both agreed it seemed incredibly close, like just up the ridge in front of us. It was getting brighter and larger and glowing blueish and clearly was not normal for this wood. Then the base started to narrow and I realized instantly it was the full moon rising over the ridge. It really had looked like it was just nearby in the woods behind the trees.
It was just a one off thing, but it really brought home how easily your perceptions can be deceived.
It’s really hard to understand it until it happens to you. People trust their eyes more than we should lol
The glowing orbs I saw were nothing like any of those
I saw 3 one right after another. Went up about 30 ft. & Dissolved. Then another showed up like a glow stick in a ball of cotton candy. For real. I had heard of swamp gas , guess that's what is was.
Thanks. My father told a story about this. He was quite consistent, and told it right up until he died. Born in '36, he was raised in a very rural area. He said that his father had a tree chopped down for some reason, and had people dig out - then burn out - the stump. He claimed that for several years after that, he could look out his bedroom window at night and see a light come up out of the hole. It would float along their 3-board fence, coming toward the house. He noted that he could count the fence-posts by that light. He said that a few times, he'd go outside, but the light would retreat down the hole & just go out. I have no idea what to make of any of that. Could it have been a recurring dream? Who knows? He was prone to a lot more magical thinking than I am; I prefer to intellectualize. But I still like a good story, and that's one. tavi.
It's a fun story. I think listening to these types of stories growing up is the reason I'm quite skeptical, because I had lots of family members who told stories like this, along with much more fantastical ones, such as communicating with aliens... they believed wholeheartedly what they said, to the point where it negatively effected their lives as people distanced themselves from these "weirdos". As I grew up I realised they were wrong, so when people say "I communicate with God" I can't help but think "but do you, though? Do you really?"
Let me tell you about my Big Foot story
I saw a UFO once. Like legitimately saw it right outside my window, plain as seeing a passing car. I jumped up and went to another window to get a better look, and it was gone. The trick is I know for a fact it wasn't real, because I had just seen the exact same UFO on a TV show earlier that day. Somehow my subconscious brain brought up that image and placed it outside my window. I've never had a case of hallucination before or after this, and it's always stuck with me. How many other people have experienced something like that, but didn't have an anchor to reality like I did? I could never trust "eye-witness" again accounts after this.
Bollocks, get off the booze mate.
My dad was from Appalachia, and there were several family ghost stories I remember from my childhood.
I witnessed the Marfa lights in 1993 but when I went there in 2008 no go. It is a mesmerizing display. As the sun goes down one can establish a baseline. Yes, those are headlights on the mountain highway to the west and yes those are farmhouse lights turning on but after the baseline, it gets weird. The farmhouse lights remain static. Then the floating balls of light float towards you. It is utterly worth a trip to Marfa to see it. It's probably got a very mundane explanation, but I enjoy not knowing.
Imma Texan and I ain’t mad atcha😊 actually, I find the superior mirage phenomenon fascinating and no less….ironically…magical. Everything has an explanation. And the folklore psychology and how these legends come to be is lovely. Thanks, Joe!!!!
I actually witnessed a pretty wild light display one night when out on a date. We were sitting on the hood of my 74 charger when we saw multiple flashes of sideways lightning and similar electrical looking effects. Turns out, when the humidity and temperature are just right, the 1 million volt DC transmission lines near by put on a show!
i hope you still have that ‘74 charger
1 million volt DC transmission lines? I gotta ask, where was that???
@@iambiggus right I came to ask the same
@@iambiggus An example of a 1000kV DC line would be the Pacific DC Intertie.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
Its called the corona effect. Nothing to do with the virus
Truly, Joe, when these mysteries are solved, the fact that natural conditions can exist which cause these mysteries is wondeful enough in my mind. Just because things like rainbows, haloes, sun dogs, the Death Valley racing stones, and green flashes can be explained doesn't make them less awesome at all!😊😊
Exactly how I feel!
Agree 100%
True. If anything, it makes them even more interesting. As you said, the fact that things like this can occur naturally is pretty awesome. And people say magic doesn't exist! It happens all around us, more often than we realize.
@TÝR Definitely makes them more interesting. I didn't care to see any in person till he started describing what caused them, then they sounded worth taking a visit to see.
Agreed!
I remember seeing this wild light show in the sky. It honestly looked like lava pouring out in the sky above the horizon, it was incredible. It seemed large like the size of a full moon. Was it like an aircraft breaking up? Or a dimensional rip in space? And then I pulled out my phone to check the sky map and turns out it was just the moon being obscured by some dense clouds and the parts peaking out were bright orange. As the clouds passed through it made this neat rippling/dripping effect. It was hilarious but super neat.
This is a great demonstration of nature's ability to create fantastical illusions from rare meteorological phenomena. Coupled with our brain's ability to make connections and spot patterns in random uncorrelated events and it's no wonder the folk lore is awash with monsters and ghost stories.
I mean...none of us really know what the world actually looks like. It's all perception. I've sworn I've seen things from afar only for nothing to be there... tho, I've never seen lava pouring out of the sky on the horizon line. That would make my life complete.
I saw something like that when I was a kid on Halloween night, thought I'd never get an answer, it looked like a big asteroid or something - being 5/6 and on Halloween night I knew no one would believe me.
Also saw a fogbow/moonbow one night which was a bit weird bc didn't know what it was, it looked like a giant glass dome on the horizon
I saw a small orange light "orb" weave it's way through my front yard one night. There was no light on in the yard or house, so it was not a reflection of an animal's eyes or anything else. I recall it being a fairly dark night. My eyes were accustomed to the dark, as I had gotten out of bed shortly before seeing it, so I could see some details of my yard fairly clearly and I had a good sense of space and distance, but nothing had any color, nor was anything else glowing. I believe it was later in the summer, but might have been early autumn, I don't honestly remember. The "orb" moved in a slightly erratic squiggly line about a foot or two off the ground, then vanished almost as quick as it appeared. Keep in mind too that I was fully awake, not even groggy.
It moved almost like a bug, but there are no orange glowing bugs around here (not aware of there being any anywhere, to be honest). Before you think it was a firefly it was, a) not the right time of year, b) too big, I'd say it was about the size of a golf ball but almost impossible to say for sure, c) wrong color, D) glowed continuously for too long. I have no idea what it was. I've always wondered if it could have been a tiny ball lightning, but I don't recall the weather being anything stormy. There's a swamp nearby, but it seems too far for will o' the wisp to travel, at least as far as scientific consensus would suggest, and it only started glowing in my yard.
The weirdest thing though.... I had just come back from getting a drink, and as I stopped in my room about to get into bed, I had this feeling out of nowhere that I should pull back my curtain and look out the window. Like, one second I'm not thinking anything, and then I just felt so calmly sure I should look out. Like, not like I NEEDED too look, just that I should. And I saw it down in my yard and somehow, despite being terrified of the idea of ghosts my whole life, and especially creeped out my mystery lights, I felt no fear at all. Just wonderment.
This is in stark contrast to another totally different "orb" I 'saw' once, which I now think could have been a migraine hallucination (though it had never happened before and has never happened again despite frequent migraines, so I don't know). That one absolutely terrified me for weeks, especially when combined with frequent weird sounds, especially of of things being knocked over, or tapping in the walls. Even now I occasionally talk to or 'make an agreement' with the 'ghost' if I feel really anxious in that room, like, hey, don't bother me and I won't bother you, lol. No, I don't think it's a ghost, but it makes me feel better, and if there is a ghost, maybe it feels better too, haha.
I can understand your emotions, because I too same experience. And everything sync
Right after waking up, after drink, hovering above land about a person height, orb , and loss of memory everything matching
what you experienced was real. i have no clue what the true source of any of it is - we have lots of labels for paranormal phenomena but none of them seem to do anything real justice. lots of people have experienced the same things as you, including the “bug-like” movement of the orbs and accompanying poltergeist-esque lingering phenomena. i suggest looking further into it!
I saw ball lightning in the mountains of Northern California. No mistaking it. It happened once, I was with someone else and we both ducked because it was coming directly at us. I initially thought the moon had detached from the sky and decided to swoop down on us. I Checked in with her when we reconnected 40 years later and we both remember it exactly as each other remember. An orb of light coming down out of the sky, dipping below the tree line, and quickly flying right up to the door we were standing behind. We could see it through the window in the door. If it was a car headlight they'd have crashed right into the house. Imagine seeing the moon ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE HOUSE coming out of the sky and rapidly growing in size as it got nearer. This orb was WAY too bright to be a flashlight in the late 1970s, and the edges far too crisp and sharp. It was a very well-defined bright round ball. If it was a super-luminous floodlight it would have had to have been mounted to a zip line and sent down from the tree tops. We both tried to duck at the same time to get out of the way and it disappeared.
I prefer the scientific name "haduken". 😁
@@christinejalandoni5919 if it was on Thanksgiving and was used to cook a duck,chicken and turkey at the same time, would that be called a "haduken turducken"?
@@bryanrhodes369that doesn't even rhyme. Please never try being funny again as it doesn't suit you.
@@Brandon-dy8us no. You are stuck with me. Copium is your friend.
@Brandon thanks for contributing to my core belief anyone named Brandon or any variation thereof is a douche.
I live an hour away from the Thai-Lao border in Udon Thani, Thailand. The town Nong Khai is adorned with effigies of the Naga and it's famous for viewing the Naga lights at the end of the rice harvest (Oct). I tried going to see the lights then, but there were too many people making their own fires and lighting off fireworks to tell if the light being seen was from the Naga lights or people lighting something up. Unfortunately, it was underwhelming and the people gathered to party made it difficult to study.
There are a few abandoned mines in the Hessdalen valleys. We did find an abandoned mine entrance even, but it looked too dangerous to go inside. Our host, Peder Skogaas who welcomed most researchers into the valley, showed us that he managed to create electricity with elements he gathered around the mines. His theory was that Hessdalen is creating natural "batteries" with the different minerals and metals found in the ground and that it might be cause for the lights. There are so many interesting stories and even research data from Hessdalen, it's crazy. Thanks for looking into the Hessdalen lights! Much appreciated!
I remember reading about that and the natural batteries which actually have been shown to produce currents.
@@Dragrath1 Source?
It has been 3 years to the hour since my stepdad died, & he was more of a Dad than my actual father. Honestly seeing this video pop up from my favourite UA-camr feels very personal. Even though it is a complete coincidence, thank you for uploading this. No matter what, I'll enjoy this video. Thanks again!
Sorry for your loss Shannon, but he is alive if you remember him❤️
@@Roguescienceguy thank you very much. In 20 minutes it will be 3 years since the worst 2 moments of my life, answering the door to the police officer telling me, to walking 5 metres to wake up my Mum up to tell her. In that moment I remember thinking "please transport me to 1 year from now", but 3 years later it isn't any better. Its just so tough...
As someone who's been a surrogate father figure I can tell you from my point of view he must've been one heck of a man to mean so much to you. I bet he talked the world up about you, too. 😉
And I'm sure the last thing he would want is for you to feel this pain. And I'm just a stranger saying nice things, but this stranger has seen strange things I grapple with when trying to understand it. There's more to life, we just can't explain it yet. Is there something "next" for us in another life? I dunno, but I've seen too much to remain a skeptic.
And as someone who's lost I hope it gets easier as time goes by. I wish I could say it gets better, but it does get easier. Hopefully this random hug will give you a little smile on this most painful day (((Hugs)))
@@shannonm7981 you could try celebrate him by living a good life by his values. I know it's hard and I don't know you but I'd give you a big hug right now. You seem like you are a person with a good heart, I can relate to that. Take good care of yourself, alright? Make him proud🥲
@@shannonm7981 That sounds a lot like my youth. I lost a lot of people all at once on top of so many other challenges. Sucks when you have to grow up so quick. But it does harden you for anything life can throw at you. Hence it doesn't get better, but it does get easier.
Damn, the su***de is rough. I'm sorry you went through that. As someone who is in that club myself, the second chance club if you will, damn... One thing to remember about this, we typically do this because we think we are unburdening our friends and family from whatever problem is eating us alive. It sounds so counter intuitive but remember our brains are effectively broken at that time. There's so much to unpack that I'm not going to try here, i apologize. Just reassure him that you care, that you're not angry or upset for what he did. That convo will come later. Just remind him you still love him. And PLEASE get him to a counselor if he hasn't already. It does work when you apply yourself... Sadly I speak from experience.
And as silly as this sounds having someone _you_ can just talk to is incredibly important as well. Be it a close friend, family or even a counselor, it's the only way to fully work through the pain. It took me twenty years of suffering through that pain alone before I finally accepted the help. I'll be 44 this summer and I still see a counselor. But I've also seen death in person, in very graphic ways, to very close people. But with talking to people I learned it's okay to hurt, for most of us it's something we all face eventually. But holding it in because you feel you shouldn't, or can't talk will just eat you alive.
Sorry, didn't mean to rant, but you really do remind me of how hard it was. I dunno, call it a message from Dad, but I am the youngest also, and I still (try to) hold it together for them. But you do learn and grow from it all. I look at it this way, if you want to dwell on the past, remember the good things.
My maternal grandmother had a story she loved to tell (which was corroborated by my mother and grandfather who were present at the time of the event) about an experience she had in Virginia when a floating orb (likely ball lightning since it was actually fairly common in the region) passed through the (closed) kitchen window, then through the (closed) door of the freezer, nestled itself between the ice cream and leftover chicken soup and promptly exploded the entire top half of the appliance it'd decided was it's new home.
What a great story!
I wouldn't even mind the exploded fridge just because it would be so cool to see. It must have been attracted to the cold for some reason.
@@macehilmatecilof4140 My suspicion (though, infuriatingly, there's no way to confirm it at this point) is that it was drawn to the compressor for the cooling system on the back of the fridge because it was the closest and/or highest voltage device to the window. Electromagnetic fields, something, something, attraction, something, something.
I figure the explosion happened when the thing got close enough to the radiator to discharge into the copper tubing and rapidly heat (and, thus, expand) the refrigerant, leading to the tubing and/or compressor doing a boom.
It's also possible the refrigerant could have ignited, as well, but the refrigerant in use at the time is different than the one used today 'cause environmental regulations, so I'm not 100% sure on that one. Or on any of this whatsoever.
@@meatharbor Well, don't know a LOT necessarily, but a couple principles might help you out...
First, Cold Dry air in winter is a kind of "turbo-charge" in many places for static electricity fields... Things like Vandergraf generators or even the kiddie' trick of scuffing your feet on a carpet to shock the F*** out of someone tend to work better in the wintertime because if this... SO it's entirely possible the cooler air in the freezer was just hospitable to the thing until it settled close to the compressor...
Second, old-school refrigerant was mostly those infamous CFC's one hears about destroying the Ozone, because almost nothing else will react with them, so they tend to actually be quite stable, most of the time... I don't know if there's a legitimate "disposal method" even yet... SO the spontaneous explosion doesn't seem like the result of no more than a little static discharge with the refrigerant in contact (somehow) with oxygen... BUT of course, I could be wrong...
It's hard to say why the freezer exploded... BUT I hope this might help you along the way toward figuring it out eventually. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 A lot of old appliances weren't exactly built the safest (electronics were relatively new and a lot of safety stuff had yet to be discovered much less mandated), it's possible that ball lightning caused an arc/short circuit within an air gapped switch. With few exceptions when you turn off a power switch what actually happens is the contacts that allow current to flow are quickly pulled apart, the air provides enough insulation to prevent current from flowing (in high voltage circuits there may be a dielectric fluid instead of air but the switch is still pulled apart quickly). If the switch isn't separated enough or is separated slowly then an arc can form in which current does continue to flow (it arcs) but because air is a poor conductor extremely hot plasma is formed. This is also why light switches click (and if they don't click/stay in the middle it's time to change the switch because it's a fire hazard). Introducing plasma or a flame between the two contacts can also give the air a temporary boost in conductivity allowing an arc to form and once an arc forms it basically maintains it's own conductivity by continually ionizing the air. I presume ball lightning could also create arcing conditions and if a hot arc formed near the compressor that could create enough pressure to blow it up. That said I'm not sure if old fridges had a compressor at the top, it's also possible that an arc formed and set off a reaction or heated something else up inside the freezer enough to explode (explosions are caused by a rapid release of pressure so any pressurized container, even something like a sealed bag of corn, could become a bomb if it's rapidly heated).
There is an area in york/adams County in PA that we have had many MANY unexplained phenomenon over many generations. UFOs, UAPs, ghosts, odd electromagnetic activity, etc. Pretty recently, my mom mentioned a very bright ball of light floating over the creek below the house, following the water, in the middle of the night. She said it made no sound, and was moving at a consistent speed and height. She thought maybe it was someone in a kayak or small boat with an LED light, but it was going against the current, and didn't change it's course even when going over the area of the creek where the rocks and rapids are. Just steadily continued.... it freaked her out pretty good, and she likes to rationalize everything
Yes!! I'm in York and have seen some extremely bizarre things from swarms of bright orange objects in the sky, to a rhomboid silent craft stopping right in the middle of the sky over me, a huge stingray like craft with headlights, spirits, hearing strange things that you can't find any reason for.
@@mtjs8746isn't it wild???? I have heard of a couple people who have seen a "floating skyscraper" in the area around Thomasville and Pigeon Hill... I think this area is really underrated. Which is kind of cool for us.
Always think of balloons and young kids having fun. You can't explain it = /= mystery. Someone else can.
Also, high voltage electricity lines, transformers, that kind of thing from a distance can be silent.
I’ve never been so invested in watching videos until I found your channel, perfect balance of seriousness and humor! Thank you for doing what you do🤍
These generic bot comments are getting out of control. No relation to the actual video content, just generic "Golly-gee, you're the the best UA-camr EVER" platitudes
Bruh I’m real😭😭😭😭
@@baconsarny-geddon8298 I’m sorry i actually enjoy his channel 😭😭😭😭👋
@@Psithurism16 Thank you for being real. Or a real-good bot 😂
@@markmuir7338 your welcome! I am 100% real bro I promise 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭I swear some of these bots are getting so good that now I’m getting accused of being a bot ridiculous 😭
Love that you shouted out Wendigoon’s video, as soon as you started talking about the lights I was hoping you would! Excellent video here too sir!
Right!!! This is a sign of just how big wendigoons is on UA-cam now
Felt exactly the same, as soon as I heard him mention Wendigoon I clicked on comments to praise the name drop!
I love that guy's videos. (Wendigoon) I think I've seen almost every thing he has up to date, just likes Joe's.
The Netflix film, "Summerland" uses the fata morgana phenomenon as a plot device. That was the first time I'd heard of the phenomenon so this video is a nice reminder to watch the film again. Thanks, Joe!
And as a counterpoint to "preserving the mystery" -- for myself, learning how movies are made hasn't made me enjoy them any less. I think that knowing what causes these phenomena to happens doesn't detract from the wonder of it. Knowing how the Northern Lights work doesn't make them any less beautiful to see.
In Uruguay we call them "Luces Malas" (Bad Lights) and the folklore associated them to graveyards or tragedy/murders/battle locations. Thank you, Joe!
Grave lights are a thing. I believe there are bioluminescent mosses that happen to like the conditions they offer.
@@Whateverhasbeenmynameforyears My old pair of headphones had a feature where putting my hand on the right muff would switch them between transparency mode (amplifies sounds from outside, meant to make it easier to talk without having to take the headphones off) and noise canceling mode. Whenever I passed by a certain graveyard my headphones would start freaking out, rapidly switching between the two modes. I eventually realized that there were lines where it would happen, so if I stood in one space it would just keep switching but moving a little bit stopped it until I walked into the next line. Since the switch was based on a near field sensor (kind of like a mini radar but super short ranged and only points in one direction) I initially thought the overhead power lines were causing it until I realized it was only happening during the day then I figured out that it must have been from the sun hitting one of the gravestones and refracting off in just the right way. One of the gravestones is giant and has a shiny black color/texture to it.
@@grn1 Neat. Good detective work.
I have a relative who lives near a major airport. As a kid, my cousins and I would lay outside on clear summer nights and look for lights on alien space ships. Of course we were seeing the lights of airplanes on approach to the airport that was within 20 miles of us. But we were little and everything about it was exciting. Staying up late, being together, having the chance to just be free to be kids and let our imaginations grow.
Awww, I just made myself smile at the memory 💜. Thanks for a video that brought back such a warm memory, despite feeling like a heel who ruined the magic of something.
Makes me miss my childhood lol
A friend of mine saw ball lightning. She was on a third floor of an office building, and during a storm, a globe of light the size of a soccer ball appeared through the wall. It appeared to roll across her desk, but instead of falling off when it reached the end, it kept on travelling horizontally in free-space until disappearing through the wall on the other side of the room.
Woah
My grandmother experienced this on a bus in England about 100 years ago. It certainly made me curious about the idea of ball lightning. A pretty cool phenomenon, whatever the cause.
@@osakarose5612 Apparently it seemed to be attracted to people. But nobody touched it. It came in through the glass window, went between a few benches, then went through the body of the bus. Not sure how much of that is invented memories though.
that’s not how electricity works… definitely not lightning of any sort
@@TheJunky228 I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion. I'm an engineer, and there are all sorts of ways to make sparky light shows that defy expectations. The question is whether nature can create these. I doubt it, but I can't say for sure.
I had ghostly lights that would appear and disappear in my basement. Freaky stuff! I decided to investigate. The next time they appeared, I froze in my tracks. I could make them “move” by moving my head back and forth. Then I realized the lights were made by a lens flare off my corneas by the light as the top of the stairwell. Mystery solved! 😂
As a glasses wearer I'm well familiar with lens flare. Sometimes I'll look at a digital clock (the ones with 7 segment LED numbers) and notice a ghost copy of the numbers that move with my head.
@@grn1 Wearing glasses or sunglasses, it's pretty easy to get tricked into thinking a reflection of something _behind you_ in the corner of the lenses is actually an object easily close to your face and moving quickly.
@@CookiesRiot I don't think I've ever experienced that and I've been wearing glasses since I was a young child. The clock thing is always when I'm looking at a clock at a slight angle, usually looking up at the clock. A similar effect sometimes happens with street lights. How clean my glasses are may also effect things.
My father told a story about the MinMin lights in Australia. He was driving the truck early in the morning between Dunedoo and Dubbo and had a light follow along beside the truck in the trees. He swore that it wasnt anything human - it wasnt hunters with a light, it wasnt the moon, it wasnt a vehichle because it crossed over a river without pausing. He just said it was an orange ball of light that was beside him for a few miles.
I will be in the Outback this summer so I will be sure to keep a look out for Min Min lights.
I think we definitely have a lot more to learn about our planet, because I'm certain these are either geological or meteorological phenomena of some kind. There are so many such sightings. I've seen one, my son has seen one - quite different in appearance, but in an area that's a bit marshy and has occasional mild earthquakes. The more people admit they've seen things like this publicly, the more come forward and say they've seen them too.
I saw my orb about 20 years ago. My son knew about it, because he was there with me, but I didn't tell my husband until lockdown and have only recently started to describe what I saw online more recently.
Amazing to think that what your dad saw followed him for a few miles (what I saw lasted maybe a couple of minutes, and travelled maybe 20 feet at most before it disappeared).
Since I think that static electricity might be part of the answer, I wonder if it was attracted to your dad's car.
It's called being on drugs kid
@@debbiehenri345I mean the explanation was literally in the video but okay
wasn't it probably just his own headlights reflected back, which is why they followed along neatly and crossed a river? as explained above? I'm pretty sure, but still love for your dad he had this magical experience, cuz of course it feels that way if something like this happens, no matter the logical explanation.
I never tell this story because I hate that I still can't explain it with science.
I was 20, living in a house with 4 other students at my university. After living there for a couple months, I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a beating heart that seemed to be coming from the walls themselves, matched by a blue, pulsing light that seemed to be coming from a corner of the closet. I genuinely thought I was having some sort of mental break. I walked out of my room and the sound stopped the moment I stepped into the hallway... and then started again as soon as I went back into the room. I walked around the rest of the house, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, but it was silent. I went outside to see if there was any sort of blue light shining into my closet... but there was nothing. No moon, no street lights. I didn't wake any of my housemates because I didn't want them to think I was crazy, so I took a walk around my neighborhood. By the time I came back, the light and the sound had stopped.
...Then it happened again that next night. This time I was so distressed that I woke up one of my housemates, crying. I pleaded with them to come into my room and tell me if they heard anything or saw anything weird. As soon as they stepped into my room, their eyes went wide and they looked at me with a look of terror. They heard the heartbeat and saw the pulsing light in the closet.
I was a staunch atheist at the time and hated any sort of woo-woo stuff. She was raised as a Buddhist. She sat in my room with me as we listened to this weird heartbeat and watched the pulsing light in the closet. She thought it must be the soul of some person that passed away young and was confused and stuck in this Earth realm. I was freaked out enough to just go with this explanation. She chanted for probably an hour and then it stopped. We never saw the light or heard the heartbeats again.
25 years later and nothing like that has ever happened to me again. But I'll never forget it.
Man I feel that, I don't know what it is but it's always crazy until you experience something weird yourself. Who knows what it was, but you experienced it, y'know? And it's been so long that you can't explain it. I've had some weird stuff happen too, most of the time it's explainable. Like this one time as a little kid, I ran into my room and the closet door slammed. Scared me so damn much I had a hard time going into that closet or even the room ever since then. Mostly likely, though, a window was open and I don't remember (we had AC units in some rooms but others didn't, so we would keep the windows open and that was likely the case).
But then something just so damn crazy happens to you and others (which is the key thing) that you just can't write it off. One time after I was a little older, we moved to a new house. Everything was fine until all of a sudden it seems like we were being haunted. It was like something happened cause it was a new house and everything was fine and then just one day it all started happening. I'm pretty sure I was the first person to see anything, which was a shadow casted by the light of my brother's room walk into it. It was like someone walked into the room but no one was there. My parents told me that it was a person jogging outside, cause the street lights were on and there was a tiny little escape window (we slept in the basement) and so it might have been that. I called BS cause it was cast by the room light, not a tiny window light. I also saw a full body, legs moving and all, and it was against the floor, meaning the angle was the light of the room not a street light. We were walking down stairs to go brush our teeth and it was like right when I walked into the room it happened. I don't know why but whenever I think about it I always get stressed and tears start forming even though I'm not emotional about it. I was probably the most scared I ever was at that moment, and my parents didn't know what to do and just kinda wrote it off. Then they started to experience stuff, and my brothers, and then one day a few months later, it all just stopped. Just nothing. It was like a few months of putting up with it and then boom just done like it never happened. It was pretty consistent, like something happening every couple weeks, and it always was around the same area of the house, but then it just stopped. No records of it happening before as well cause we talked with the landlords and they said they hadn't heard of anything. Still bothers me just cause I got no idea other than what I saw and remember. Hell if it was just the shadow I would write it off as a kid memory that was over hyped and remembered different than how it happened and it probably was just an illusion, but then my parents and family started seeing stuff as well and that only made things worse then cause it was confirming that fear I had to be genuine. I don't like talking about it cause when people say "bro stop lying" or "nah clearly you're just falling for an illusion" it just bugs me cause- I mean you know what you see, right? I've seen stuff that I can tell is fake, and then I see stuff that I can tell is real when it comes to this, and so actually having something happen just really sets me off cause I just know what I saw and I gain nothing by lying about it, or if it was some minor thing it just wouldn't be burned into my memory and have a physical response when recalling it, y'know? Gotta be more to experience than what we can see and feel in some ways.
@@medicodyssey absolutely. There is FAR more to existence than what we perceive. We are only aware of 4 possibly 5 dimensions using our normal senses. The spacial 3 dimensions of “up, down, left/right” and time, with gravity/velocity being possibly another dimension. Mathematically, there should be at least 12(!) dimensions!! That means we aren’t even AWARE of HALF of what is going on around us. Anything that exists within other dimensions has the probability of randomly entering into and out of the dimensions that we are able to perceive and would be nearly indescribable as a result. They would behave in ways that are unnatural to us. Makes one wish for a bunch of gear that could be used to examine and experiment with the anomaly you experienced
@@medicodyssey My parents house has always had... Something, going on. I'd be downstairs alone in the house and there's be a huge crash from upstairs like someone threw a text book on the floor. Sometimes the sound of furniture scooting around. Going up to check, I'd never see anything out of place. I'd completely written this off as my overactive childhood imagination until last year. My mom brought it up at dinner, describing the exact same thing. I'd never mentioned it to her, or anyone else. She also told a story about my father thinking she was climbing into bed next to him, only to turn around and see no one was there.
The house was built for them, there was no earlier structure, no history that we know of for the site. It was just woods. Very odd stuff.
I’m a pretty skeptical person in general-although, I do think there is *something* to some of the “paranormal” stuff that people experience-but I have a story of my sister’s and her friend that I still find difficult to explain to this day.
We were at summer camp in the backcountry of central-western Alberta, up in the foothills of the Rockies. I’d like to preface with: my sister is an incredibly truthful and rational person. She has a childlike innocence to her, even to this day, and she has never, ever been one to make up stories. Also, I was a Jr. Leader this year along with two other young ladies, and we had our own cabin close to the wash house.
So, it was the last night of camp, and my sister’s best friend was standing on the front porch of their cabin, just watching girls go from their cabins to the wash house and back. Twilight was setting in, so it was getting hard to make out details; as she stood on the porch, she noticed a tall person standing a few metres out in front of my cabin. She thought this was her Jr. Leader, and so she hopped off the porch and made her way over to talk to her. But as she drew closer, she realized how strange this figure actually was: it has elongated arms and legs, a tall, very thin body that was all beige in colour, wearing no clothes, and it had a large, elongated head, similar to an alien you might see in Star Wars. And as she got closer still, she realized that, based on the contours of the head, this thing seemed to be looking right at her-except that it had no facial features: no nose, no mouth, no eyes; nothing. She immediately turned around and hoofed it back to the cabin.
After this incident m, she didn’t tell anyone, just went about her business back at the cabin. We Jr. Leaders had come back from the washroom and were doing the nightly rounds of saying good night to each cabin. When we arrived at my sister’s cabin, I found my sister huddled in a ball on her bunk, quietly crying, while this friend was comforting her and speaking to her in whispers. I asked my sister what had happened, but she just told me to go away. (*Little sisters*, I thought.)
The following morning, my sister and her friend relayed to us what had happened. She’d been on top of her bunk getting changed into her pyjamas, when something caught her eye out the window. She looked up and tried to make sense of what she was seeing-initially it looked like a person, but then she realized that this thing was very tall and very thin, with a large, elongated head, with no eyes or any facial features-and she could tell it was staring right at her.
We have no idea what happened to this thing between it looking in at my sister and us Jr. Leaders arriving at the cabin. As far as we know, no one but these two 11-year-old girls had seen the thing. To this day, I still cannot think of a very good reasonable explanation for what they saw.
The only thing I can think of is that the youngest of the three men who were at the camp that week may have brought along some kind of alien suit and put it on to scare/spy on the girls (he was the only one of the three who was tall and lanky.) But with so many people going to and from the wash house, I would think that someone else would have seen him walking from his trailer toward the cabins; not to mention, my best friend and co-leader was his sister-in-law, and her sister would have tipped her off if he’d brought some ridiculous alien suit with him along with all the baby stuff they had to pack for their twins. In any case, both girls insisted that this figure was even skinnier than he was, and I think it’s highly unlikely that he would have done something like that anyway. Perhaps we’ll never know what it was they saw, but I do know that that area of Canada is pretty creepy.
Meh
This video just explained stories my rural folks in a very arid and flat part of the country have been telling me!
I was in Norway, a long way north of Hessdalen, earlier this year photographing the northern lights and saw (and photographed) some unexplainable lights very very similar to the Hessdalen lights. Others out that night commented about it to me too. They were not as beautiful as the northern lights although were brighter. I think scientific explanations of natural phenomena doesn't detract from the stories, they are mysteries of our earth.
and there are so many more... mysteries.. I love it.
There are several other areas of Norway that have these lights all along the coast from Stavanger to Tromsø
Hesdalen is just in the middle
I'm no expert but it might have something to do with the fact that all along the coast of Norway you have an old really old mountain chain and it sits on the edge of the Baltic shield lots of old mineral deposits all the way up the coast
So if you wear in Bodø or Tromso area that's the northern end of it
Hesdalen is the best documented of the lights but as I said you'll find them all along the coast
We also have here in Norway the largest known thorium mine
As you know it's a low radiation mineral that actually glow blue in large concentrations really cool but a bit dangerous
and we see some really wierd shit here to I live right on top of the mine
So maybe there's something to do about piezoelectric and radiation in combination I don't know Just a thought
Just saying 🇧🇻
@@yvindwestersund9720 That's fascinating - thanks
@@kylieellway2 hey it's a wierd place
How do you think that the vikings got the way they did 🤔😂🤣
One of my parents is from the Pudasjärvi region in Finland, just on the southern border of Lapland basically. Apparently there were a lot of unexplained lights/some sort of UFOs in the 1950s and 1960s (I think) at that area. Unfortunately I don't know much about this since people were rather quiet about what they might have seen, in fear of being viewed as crazy. But I did hear that my grandparents did see these moving weird lights on several occasions, but again, were reluctant to share many details. I'd love to hear more about this, I think there are a couple of old documentaries and such, but not much to go on.
Wendigoon is a lovely fella and the heart he put into that video is fantastic. Good on you shouting him out.
The truth is often times more interesting than myth. Thanks Joe for sharing!
My former teacher is an anthropologist who did fieldwork in one of the indigenous communities in the Amazon. One of the beliefs of this group was that a globe of light leaves the body after death. My teacher obviously doesn't believe in these things, but on one of the days she was there, a member of the community had died, and as it was getting dark, the community members asked everyone to go back to their tents, so that the spirit would not be disturbed during its passage. Coincidentally or not, when my teacher returned to her tent, around 18 : 00 PM, she saw a globe of light coming from where the body was resting and left towards the forest. She herself said that there are things that cannot be explained by our science during these fieldworks, but within these communities they are part of everyday life, and that when we visit them, we must ignore everything we think we know and open ourselves to experiences.
What a load 😂 I've got a bridge to sell you 😂
If she went back to her tent how did she see anything
I love stories like this Joe. We saw a blue ball flash outside our house once. Both my wife and I saw it. We always figured it was ball lightening but a ghost story is way more fun :) Appreciate all your work Joe!
I'm so glad you covered this topic. I live in the Blue ridge area and live a couple minutes away from Brown Mountain. I always loved hearing people's stories about them around October. I had no clue that there was other places and stories of this phenomenon.
I've seen them. I grew up in East Tennessee, and spent a lot of time in NC in my 20s.
I'm so happy that you mentioned the Paulding lights I've experienced them and it was so mysterious and beautiful. Even if it's just car lights. I will say you stand at a weird slant when viewing and that very well could add to the illusion. But that part of your brain that is full of mystery and bewilderment takes over. You can definitely get those spooky vibes while watching.
this video reminded me of a story my mother told us at a few occasions. It was a story known in her village and I can't remember now, but I think the person it happened to she knew, or knew indirectly.
He stayed late in another village, because of work or celebration, and although asked to sleep over he decided to head home taking a shortcut through the forest at night. He saw a light above ground moving and thinking it to be a person with a lantern called out to it, asking to join it through the forest. It waited for him. So he followed the light. The story goes that he was lead all around the forest until morning and when the sun came up the light was no more. There was no one there. He came home with his clothes all torn from getting caught in thorns and branches.
I always remember that one when there's talk of mysterious lights.
Sounds like a made up story, no one follows lights around a forest all night if they are getting led through areas where they get injured .
Sounds like folklore.
That was a really great video! Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy making it, it had a really great classic Answers with Joe vibe. But maybe that was music/pacing/writing, idk exactly.
Was really happy to see you shout out wendigoon, his brown mountain lights video was phenomenal!
I camped on Brown Mountain (Linville Gorge) and saw a blue light. It appeared right by my head outside of my tent around 12am. I couldn’t sleep so it startled me when it showed up. Our camping spot was enclosed by the mountain side and dense forest, a very isolated spot. The parking lot was much lower in elevation and it would not have been possible for someone’s flashlight to have shined through much less headlights. I’d be curious of what it was. It was floating in one place for more than one minute then collapsed in on itself. It floated about a foot off the ground and was about the size of a softball. The light was dense and bright. It illuminated some of the area around it, including the inside of my tent. But not so bright that I couldn’t look at it. I’d imagine if it was gas that it would move/dissipate outward. Not gonna lie, it scared me a little bit.
Weird I had a similar experience, but I was indoors and the orb was more like a shadow in my case. My friend saw it too which is the only reason I can believe it actually happened.
The orb appeared by my head and then shot off into a mirror when I looked at it. I looked at my friend and he just said, “Did you see that?” As we were flabbergasted as to what happened, we realized a jacket was swinging on the wall and wouldn’t stop. We ran out of there and didn’t go back
Similar experience to yours, but we were indoors and the ball lightning was outside. We were also among trees so couldnt have been cars. The moon was on the other side of the house. It lasted no more than a few seconds but came out of the sky and flew at the door we were standing behind. We xould see it out the window
I was so excited to see this video and was slightly disappointed because my experience didn’t really fit in with the solutions. Something else happened and I’m open to find out what it was.
It really is crazy that so many people have experiences like this. I always told my cousin the story and one day he ran into my friend that witnessed it with me. My friend told my cousin they exact same story, so I think my cousin mostly believes me now.
What a unique experience to share with another! I believe you. Who knows what it could have been. It’s fun to wonder. I tell my story every now and again and I get some funny looks haha but it’s okay. I know our experiences are unique and the answers are still out there somewhere.
Thank you Joe. Thank you for being you. I keep watching because of your honesty and humor, not to mention the great topics.
Great video as always Joe! I grew up about 20 miles or so from Paulding and this is probably the first time anyone has called it a city :)
If there were only a few things to spoil before all the mystery in life was gone, it would be a shame to do so and thus lose that mystery. But in my experience with every step exploring a mystery or scientific question, leads to knew mysteries with as much awe and wonder as we could ever wish to appreciate. Thanks so much to those role models in my life that helped me learn this lesson early. In other words, you spoiled very little for us eager learners and have done a great job opening our minds to new wonders. So thanks Joe!
I saw one myself long ago in Northern California up above Middletown in the mountains. My girlfriend and I were staying in a cabin and there was a fierce storm. Wind, rain, and all of the trees around the cabin created an interesting symphony of sounds that night as we tried to sleep. Outside was an orchard on one side and forest on all other sides. On the orchard side it was all knee deep mud all the way to the main road, about 300 yards and luckily there was a gravel road on the other side of the cabin that wrapped around the orchard that met the road about half a mile south of the cabin. Out the bedroom window was a view of the other side of the orchard where it met the forest. There were taps and creeks, and scratches as the branches of trees brushed against the cabin along with the howling of the wind and the pouring of the rain onto this cabin, which was built pretty well actually. I couldn't really get to sleep and kept having strange dreams in a semi-sleeping/waking state because of all of the noise. My head was right next to the wall of the cabin and all of the sudden I heard four distinct taps in perfect time right by my head. It really got my attention since everything else was randomly spaced out. Immediately after the four taps was a scratching sound like someone took a branch on the outside of the cabin, right where my head was and dragged it slowly along the side of the cabin, in the direction towards the orchard side, where the window was on the adjoining wall. This was about 20 feet, and it was slow and continuous and this really got my attention since it followed a very unusual series of taps right next to my head. Just then I saw a light flashing across the window. I immediately shot up out of bed. My girlfriend was snoring. I tried to wake her up but she was fast asleep and I had no time to spare. I ran over to the window to see a light that was soft white, like a flashlight. I thought to myself, "who the heck could be out there in that storm, and they are surely going to get stuck in the mud out there, as I watched the light dance around about 30 or so feet out in the orchard, bobbing up and down and weaving through the trees. A few seconds later it took off through the orchard as I watched it move 300 or so yards in a matter of seconds, and then I realized it wasn't a person with a flashlight, it was something else. This was before drones and the wind was howling anyways, and the rain was pouring down... I continued to look into the blackness of the night through that window with intense curiosity, my heart pounding and my mind racing to make a logical connection as to what it was, as the light was now across the road making it's way quickly up the mountain on the other side, faster than anything could move through the terrain. My heart was racing now as I wondered what the heck the thing was. Afterwards I laid there awake wondering as I listened once again to the symphony of random sounds against that old cabin, eventually dozing off to sleep. Something was checking on us in there, but it didn't feel threatening... although I certainly wasn't going to go outside and chase after the thing, I wouldn't have been able to move that fast through the mud anyways. It seemed to be a point of soft-white light, about the size of a baseball, that moved in continuous motion weaving it's way through the trees. There was no lightning or thunder that night, nor the following day, and there was no accompanying noises with the light, other than the initial four distinct taps on the outside of the cabin wall right where my head was that jolted my senses to wide awake by their distinct difference from the normally random sounds everywhere, and then the continuous scratching sound that shot me up in the bed moving my attention to the window at the far wall in the room. Ball lighting again? I don't know...
This does not sound like an account of a memory of an event
I live on the 6th floor in Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Long back, when I was 11, from my living room I could see weird lights. They were single yellow dots, appeared at the exact same point, appeared constantly through the night, the interval between them was irregular and the duration of each instance was irregular too. It seemingly appeared from inside a mangrove forest.
I was fascinated but frustrated that I couldn't find out what they were. I asked my dad and he thought it must be light blinking from a mobile tower. But I wasn't convinced because of the irregular duration and frequency. I scratched my head for over a year probably.
Then one night while I was at my friend's flat on the 9th floor, I finally figured out. Of course, they were car headlights.
It was a section of a State Highway. For a brief moment on that section, you would be travelling towards our building, before taking a sharp left turn. Since there were mangroves in front of it, most of the road wasn't visible except for that section (which probably had a tree missing). The irregular duration was because of cars travelling at different speeds and the irregular intervals was because, obviously cars don't travel at perfect intervals from each other.
Because they were mangroves (thus short trees), going up to the 9th floor was enough to see over them and at the entire road.
Honestly, even if there's no magic or ghosts involved, it is still fascinating how these lights can be seen in other places than where they were initially caused "simply" by the right conditions of warm air flow. I personally have always been interested in fatamorganas and it doesn't get less interesting just because you explain how they work ☺️
Agreed! For me it's an even better time geeking out over the why instead of getting lost in mystery.
Great theory but the Marfa lights don't seem to work that way.
Like the aurora borealis. I know what it is, would still love to see it.
As physicist Richard Feynman said: "I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree.
Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.
The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."
I live in Norway and in 2019 I went with some friends to see the Hessdalen lights. We camped for 2 nights near the visitor centre there, didn't see anything the first night, but was lucky enough to see it the 2nd. It was a lot brighter than I thought and moved slowly parallell to us like 20-30m over the treeline. It only lasted around 5-10 minutes before it kind of faded and at the same time went downwards closer to the treetops where we couldn't see it anymore from our vantage point. The interesting thing I remember from this experience was how fast it appeared. We were in the car listening to music and just talking, when one of us just noticed it had appeared and we went outside to look at it. It didn't slowly fade into existence, one moment it wasn't there, the next moment it was.
In the mid 80s When I was about 15, I was with two friends walking home at night in the UK's north and a silent glowing orb drifted by above our heads - from memory I recall it appeared to be only about 10-20m away and maybe beachball sized and within a few seconds it was gone. We turned to each other and said "you did see that right?" -- but after that night we never really discussed it and have since moved our separate ways. Looking back at that, often after watching something like this video to remind me, I'm convinced that it must have been some kind of electrical phenomona -- there was an electricity substation and pylons only about 100m away. Perhaps some kind of plasma ball could form in perfect conditions from the spark of a power surge or other trigger. Then slowly drifting by and dissipating, like our youth. Dammit. lol
I was saddened when my brother and I experienced the Marfa Lights firsthand and figured what we were seeing must be headlights. It seemed implausible because looking on the map where HWY67 is, it seemed like it was too far away to be seen from where we were (should have been below the horizon), but the regular pattern they took over time told us there had to be some odd atmospheric phenomenon happening we weren’t aware of. I’m thankful to you for providing the superior mirage explanation.
I should also note that my sister-in-law, who was with us at the time and had spent many a night in her college days hanging out out there with friends, agreed that what we were seeing were just headlights, though that didn’t explain a handful of sightings she’d had of much more randomly behaved lights located closer. She claims the alcohol didn’t have anything to do with it either…
There are plenty of things still truly unknown with little to no proper explanation that capture our imagination. I love when you explore those topics as well as the crazy stuff like your earlier videos that just shows how far we've come... or not as a society.
Saw 3 glowing orbs come out of the woods and float across the road in front of us. Was in remote GA, in a VERY rural area on a single car dirt lane, not near other road or anything else. Known area that locals know abt. We tried to find a source. They just floated around, then went back and floated randomly around in the woods, curving around trees and...headstones. it's an old rural graveyard that is deep in woods and overgrown. I LOVE old graveyards.
I haven't seen any of the lights described, but I did see something similar in Quebec. I was at my family lake house and I saw individual red, green and yellow lights moving around the horizon incredibly fast, the whole time they move in straight lines that would stop and immediately change directions, they didn't have any trails and they just disappeared after a few minutes. No idea what could cause that, it was daytime and there wasn't any planes nearby.
A traffic light maybe?
My wife has seen ball lightning once as a teen. It was actually INDOORS during a storm and freaked her out a bit! She lived in the Western mountains of NC so it lines up with other incidents of ghost lights.
Just outside of Crossett, Arkansas there is a floating orb that has been there for as long as anyone can remember. I've seen it on a half dozen or so different occassions, as did all the people that were with me. It's something that everyone in the area knows about. The headlight explanation doesn't sound plausible because it's in the middle of nowhere and the area is surrounded by pine trees. It always seemed to be less that 10 feet from the ground so if it was headlights then the trees would break it up. Its on a small strech of dirt road and you never know if it's going to appear in front of or behind you, or if it'll be on the left or right side. Ball lightning would make more sense but I've heard more than a few accounts of it passing through vehicles. That could all be bullshit but because its been there for so long and has been seen by so many people; the fact that no one has figured out exactly what it is is kind of wild
Edit: changed "swamp gases" to "ball lightning"
I've seen it. My ex husband's family lives there and he took me to see it.
Seen a similar phenomenon back in 2001 while driving with my dad road tripping through Mexico. More specifically this happened somewhere several hours south of the Arizona border, in the middle of nowhere practically. It was a group/fleet of about a dozen red/orange orbs. At first I assumed they were fireworks being lit in the distance up above some mountains (this was a few days before Mexican Independence Day). I started paying more attention after these “fireworks” weren’t exploding but seemed to be doing some sort of choreographed routine. They would transition between moving independently from one another to moving in precise formations as if all part of a larger whole. When moving in formation, the would hold a few different positions like a big equilateral triangle or a “flying-v” like formation.
It was fascinating because there was a noticeable difference in their “gait” (for lack of a better word) between these two modes. When moving as individuals they had this awkward (almost dopey) bobbing and swaying which may have been from wind but was not noticeable when in the other mode.
These things were without a doubt intelligently controlled in some way. Not saying it was aliens or anything like that. I still have no idea. All I know is that they were the eeriest thing I’ve ever witnessed personally. And for what it’s worth, my dad has refused to talk about what we saw that night all these years later. So there’s that.
The wobbling sounds consistent with headlights and the optical effect. But sounds weird!
@@ROVA00 Oh yeah I guess I did forget to mention this was several hundred feet in the air above some mountains. I mean it’s still possible this was an elaborate optical illusion.
I wish I could have recorded this somehow. It’s really hard to convey anything accurately without having something to point to and say “here… please explain this to me”
@@SmokeyChipOatley Not to try and unmystify it for you, but honestly, it doesn't soundthat elaborate after having watched this video. It seems to happens quite often, even from upwards of 20-30km away.
Your experience sounds just like if various air currents were swirling about somewhere, somehow, maybe over the mountains, sometimes bobbling along the wind generally together and other times some turbulence comes along and knocks the individual lights around. Also, a long line of cars slowly moving across the landscape full of triangular mountains sounds like a good explanation for how the v-formations came along. The more I think about this the more it makes sense to me.
They are brujas
@@kindlin That's just dumb. What a weird mental contortion, "oh it must've been air currents swirling over the mountains, and that fact that some mountains look like triangles means it's cars". The explanation given in this video is a big stretch when it comes to a lot of sightings. I'm sure it explains some of the specific ones in this video, but it can't be applied to all similar phenomena.
These kinds of sightings are not totally uncommon, they happen around the world. Lights that alternate between moving independently and in formation. I don't know what they are either, but they do seem to act intelligently.
To once again quote the writtings of the great Sir Terry Pratchett: "Just because you know how the magic is done, doesn't mean it stops being magical" and "Isn't it enough to see that the garden is beautiful, without having to imagine fairies hiding at the bottom?"
I think the latter was Douglas Adams - Richard Dawkins used it as a tribute to him at the start of The God Delusion.
I saw something when I was young. My only ghost-like experience.
I was in bed and saw a light blue orb, about the size of a softball, maybe a little bigger, just hovering over the foot of my bed, about 3-4 feet up. I laid there with the covers pulled up just under my eyes, staring at it until I fell asleep.
I don't remember being scared, more curious with maybe a slight bit of concern.
It was along the same part of my room as the window, so couldn't have been light coming in from outside, and I don't remember ever having some sort of nightlight or anything that could have projected a sphere shape onto the wall. Never saw anything like that again.
I never thought that much of it until I had a teacher in middle school talk about the same sort of thing, which piqued my interest and I found out a lot of people have seen similar things.
Saw three of these with a friend late at night on a college campus. They were travelling quite fast through the campus grounds maneuvering around buildings and trees. After that, we both had occasional "visits" of blue light flashes that would come from empty/impossible places above and behind us. Later that year my friend saw another three late at night in the suburbs of Chicago. Kinda glad we haven't seen them or been visited in a long time
My father chased a random light through a cornfield one night. I was around 9 or 10 at the time and my mother was in the car with us, me in the back seat. The light changed color almost in the way bubbles form on top of a boiling pot. The colors were blue, green, yellow and red and blinked, or boiled in no particular order. It moved fast across the field and eventually disappeared out of sight. That's about all that I remember, other than my mother screaming, "It went that way!"
Thanks!
You know, just because you know what causes a rainbow and may be able to make one yourself with a hose, doesn't mean you can't enjoy the pretty light in the sky.
Even explained as mirage of car lights it doesn't lose its weirdness. It just shows that conventional physics may produce in rare circumstances really spooky effects. Very nice video. Quite frankly my favourite are those where some uncanny mystery gets finally resolved.
When on the water, we have often seen the horizon reflected and stretched in such a way that when we look towards shore, we see towering cliffs, or spires - but it's just the distortion of the shore or houses along the shoreline.
For me this video doesn’t ruin the lights but makes them even more magical by knowing how they function it’s so incredibly intriguing and magical to me to learn the truth about something that at first glance seems mystical and unexplainable It really gives since of wonder watching physics in work
Some of the best moments of my life were being scared while looking for ghosts as a kid.
Best moments for the ghosts too!
I think I've been chased by min min lights when I was a child... It was freaky. Walking along a bush track at night with my brothers, a light appeared down the track and came rushing towards us. We started running and the light flew over our heads a couple of meters above us, continued down the track for a bit then disappeared. It made no sound and we don't have any kind of glow bugs in this part of Australia. Never seen anything like it since.
I’ve been to Marfa during the Marfa Lights Festival and got to see them. They looked exactly like car headlights.
As for the chasing lights, we have to remember that once a cop was chasing a light that was zipping around in the sky. After miles of pursuit he finally got a clear view and realized it was the moon. His turning and going around curves made him think the light was moving instead of his car.
My dad worked at a furniture and gift store here in outback QLD. The guy bought a few things and then asked if my dad wanted his works of books. The books included old bush remedies and recipes, but one that I read a few times was campfire stories which included a few stories of ghost lights. Entering homes or staying in paddocks until investigated
Spooked the shit out of 8yr old me
The best "light in the sky" experience I ever had was driving a rural highway at night near Whanganui, New Zealand. A big, bright and very green meteor flew right across our direction of travel before burning out in a handful of pieces. It couldn't have been more than a few km away, judging by the clarity and intensity of the flickering. I found it especially interesting knowing what it almost certainly was, rather than fearing some fantastic hooey. I guess we could figure out what it was mostly composed of from the colour.
Cool!
Where exactly were you near when driving along Whanganui? This is important... can't say why on here. Maybe I would message you but I need to know the area first.
@@ctaigawhanau Main road, SH3, Eastbound. The object was going north. One of those straight flat stretches across the tops. I don't know the road well enough to be more precise. We were on our way back to Wellington from somewhere - not sure whether it was NP, Hawera or just Whanganui. I couldn't even tell you which side of Whanganui it was, sorry. Not without trawling through streetview or driving the road again at least. If there's a particular date you're interested in, I could at least say yea or nay whether it was a possibility. Did it set your hay barn on fire or something?
My grandmother lived in Quapaw, Oklahoma, so I've been out to see what Joe called the "Ozark Spooklight" many times. To locals, it's just the Spooklight. I've seen it twice. Apparently, some people DO mistake car headlights for it, but that's not what I saw. Car headlights don't move around in nearby treetops; however, what I saw might have been produced by piezoelectricity. The ground there is loaded with minerals.
None of that explains what I've heard from locals, though. Many claimed to have seen it at a distance of less than six feet, and some reported "intelligent behavior" from it. That is, it came close to them and darted away when they moved towards it. One of my mom's friends, who lived all her life on Devil’s Promenade, claimed that when she was a kid, the light developed a habit of showing up while she was waiting for the school bus. She wasn't afraid of it. She had accepted it as normal from birth. She said it was company.
Everyone who lived up in that region, my grandmother included, was very matter-of-fact about it. They regarded the light as if it were mundane. They weren't curious. They didn't repeat folklore. They didn't care what it was. It was as natural as a patch of wildflowers to them.
I've wondered about the piezoelectric effect causing the Brown Mountain lights. Ultra-pure quartz, for semiconductors, is mined nearby and there is another old quarry where the quartz for Palomar Telescope was mined.
For my own part, I saw some mysterious lights when I was standing of the back dock of a manufacturing plant near Asheville, NC. They were small and intense leaving a slight trail behind them as they moved slowly parallel to the horizon. I thought they were landing lights from the airport, but then one moved in front of a grove of trees. I saw five or six and then the power went out causing damage to the plant's power systems that took months to repair. The two would seem to be connected, but the lights were floating freely in the air and not connected electrical equipment.
My dad saw the Min Min lights in the '80s, driving a truck in far-east Western Australia on the Nullarbor. There's a train line close by and parallel to the road. He said it followed alongside his truck near the train line, where there was a stationary freight train. The lights then rose up, went ahead, went down to ground level behind the train and stayed lit for a while. There was no one else around and if you understand the Nullarbor you understand how devoid of people it is. He couldn't explain it.
Weird ,but min min is around 1600km away in southwest QLD. You can see lots of lights across the outback at night
@@mp-db5nq must have been different bizarre lights then
The same happened with my father in law in the 60’s. He claimed to have had a race with the Min min lights along the Nullarbor. The light won the race. He did mention that it wasn’t the first time that he had seen the lights, but he has since passed on so there is no way to ask him.
Despite knowing the truth, Marfa and the viewing center are absolutely worth the visit. It is incredibly beautiful out there and something so peaceful about looking out to the horizon and seeing the lights bounce around. Would recommend.
I always wanted to experience a full blown fata morgana! I've only ever seen the wiggly air, the "wet" looking roads and cars throwing 4 shadows. I'd love to see some of these!
Are you sure you want to see it? Because if you ever do you'll be really freaked out and be seen by your friends and even family as 'crazy.' Beware of what you wish for.
Hey Joe, first time seeing your channel, but a friend sent me this video because of a story I've always told people from my childhood:
I grew up in Hawaii and when I was 12 or 13 or so, I was in my kitchen at around 7pm-8pm, washing my hands in the sink after eating dinner. While looking out the window, I saw some light illuminating our neighbor's house. Our houses were about only 30 feet from each other, and we had a solid wood fence between us, so I could see light being cast on the side of his house, but I couldn't see the source of the light. I figured that my neighbor was in his yard with a flashlight walking back and forth, as the light source moved left to right quickly. However after a few seconds, the source of the light came OVER our fence- It looked like a bright blue fireball. It moved around in my small backyard area and moved back and forth, floating about 5 feet from the ground, and moving in an almost figure-8 pattern, and was about 5 feet in front of me. It was about the size of a basketball, and it gave off a shimmering effect, kind of like it was made of fire. I remember tiny pieces of the fireball sort of breaking off and dissipating instantly (search on google image "pixels breaking" and that first picture of the robot disintegrating is sort of how I would describe it). The fireball reminded me of a chi blast from Dragon Ball Z, or something, and almost teardrop shaped. Anyways, this thing flew around my yard for about 10 seconds, moving back and forth without bumping into any walls or our fence, before it flew to the left of the window, and out of sight. I ran out into my yard to see where it went, but I couldn't find where it went. After a second I thought to myself: "wtf am I doing chasing this thing?!" and ran back inside.
In Hawaii there's folklore surrounding the fireballs, as well. They're called "Akualele" and the reasonings vary from ghosts/spirits, to hostile spells being cast by "Kahuna," which is like a Hawaiian version of a shaman. So I personally don't ascribe to the theory that these ghost lights, at least the one I saw, were caused by car lights refracted from large distances, or swamp gasses, as there are no swamps or even water sources nearby (my house was a couple miles inland from the ocean). The other theories involving plasma or electricity seems possible, but I know even things like ball lightning aren't well documented since they're so rare. Anyways, that's my story :)
My mom and aunt grew up in 1960s Joplin, MO. My mom went to the location where the spook light was seen the most, but didn't see anything. However, my aunt went out there several times and on one occasion the light chased her and her friends.
I grew up in the Joplin/ Neosho/ Eureka Springs area, and heard tales about the "Spook Light." My sister sought it out and said it flew through her car one night. My mom also saw ball lightning a few times. Near Waco, MO.
I went to college in Arkansas & saw both the Gurdon Lights & the Smead Lights. Both are ghost lights situated along abandoned railroad tracks, & pretty close to one another (50-75 miles apart maybe?) but while the Gurdon Lights are in fairly close proximity to I-30, the Smead Lights are in the middle of BF, Nowhere, & sometimes appear to chase you. Pretty sure it's two completely different phenomenon that developed convergent folklore involving a railroad worker with a lantern looking for his head. ✌🏼
This is interesting… informative and entertaining as usual, Joe! I'm not a Texan, though I live in Texas, a place I'm not relaly fond of in many way, and don't worry, you did not ruin the magic of the world for me. I love science and have studied it as a correction for damaging and stupid superstitions all my life. Still, though I've read several books that try to explain the Marfa Lights as you have here, my actual experience, the testimony of my sense differs and cannot so easily be dismissed. When we watched the Marfa Lights, some of them were a lot closer than those hills in the distance, and they could be seen simply rising up out of the ground, or going down into the ground. They sometimes changed colors, split apart, combined, and were sometimes both higher than those hills (your mirage idea) but also, much closer and far lower. Some of the closest we saw appeared distinctly as orbs, not just indistinct light. Though we did see some traffic tinkling up on that highway, what we witnessed was quite distinct from those headlights and tail lights and behaved in ways that your explanation doesn't fit well. We took photos and videos. Thanks! - BPG
I was born and raised in San Antonio. I met and married a woman who was raised in Alpine Texas. I moved to Alpine Texas in 2011 after the military and I've never been to the Marfa lights. Never saw a reason to go, but people here do love their folk lore about the Marfa lights. My wife and I are people who think horse not zebra when we hear hooves. I actually once said they were head lights from cars coming up from Presidio Texas.
Wow, Joe, you've inspired a lot of people to tell their stories about strange lights. Thank you.
My story is pretty simple. I've tried to find out what it could have been but can only speculate. This was in the late '90s when I was commuting from Madison, Wisconsin to our farm along the Wisconsin River. On the outskirts of Madison, I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank. When I finished, as I was headed back to my car, I looked up and saw something very strange. It's hard to describe. The sky was heavily overcast and I saw a light in the sky moving towards me from the southwest. It appeared to be just below the clouds and I thought it was a low aircraft at first. But the light was moving much too fast to be an aircraft and seemed much too slow to be a meteor. As it got closer (it took only a few seconds) it appeared to be across the highway and moving more or less parallel with it. However, the light wasn't steady (like a car headlight). It went in a straight line but appeared to be bouncing about. It was far brighter than a car headlight. There was no sound. I've no doubt that there's a logical explanation - just none I can think of.
Haven’t started this video yet, but I did see a glowing orb of light one time in Salt Lake City come shooting down out of the mountain range and then swoop back up into some scattered clouds miles away like a Nike swoosh motion. Whole thing was only maybe 2 seconds long
Edit: I saw it twice actually, the above comment was the second time. The first time I saw it was out of the corner of my eye shooting into the mountain range, as opposed to coming out the second time. It was a cloudless night
Not a headlight, or a campfire. The explanation in this video is a bit of a stretch tbh. It no doubt explains some sightings, but not all.
Knowing is better than not knowing. And if there was a such a thing near me, I'd totally go see them even knowing there's a mundane explanation
Also, the ghost stories that grow up around these are fun!
I was just there. Didn't see the phenomenon in Marfa, but we did experience it at camp in Big Bend
Me and a buddy saw ball lightning one time at Crescent Lake in Southington CT. We were on a res ride when a ball of light that was bigger than his car popped up in the middle of the water, then disappeared. Then another one came and went. Then another came and moved over the water in the same direction we were driving for a short distance with a buzzing sound as it went. It was really wild. Never saw em before or since. If it were not for the fact that we both saw it, I might have suspected that it was the drugs. We are both nerds, so we assumed there was an atmospheric anomaly that we couldn't explain. Still, so darn cool.
As someone who watches Wendigoon before he blew up, it's so damn cool seeing someone like you mention him in a video.
Agreed. It’s super cool to see one of my favorite UA-camrs mention another one of my favorites
I personally think knowing how and why this happens is way more interesting than just knowing the folklore. You are seeing science in action. Which means you can repeat the experiment in other places. It might take some modeling, but it sounds cool. Awesome topic, thank you.
"As is often the way when you understand the true nature of something, then that's all the more reason to revere it."
- Prof. Brian Cox comparing our ancestors' worshipping of the Sun to modern science's understanding of it.
These are some of my favourite phenomena, because they are pretty well documented. People are definitely seeing something, it’s definitely not “aliens” or “ghosts” but it is “something”
@@ernieb820 True. Until we have defined exactly what these things are, we can't discard that possibility.
Seen one in front of my head one morning when waking up, went by the window 5 seconds later.
@@ernieb820 well considering ghosts don’t exist, and aliens have never once been documented, I can say that with pretty high certainty.
I saw one myself. I would most def. call it alien. I don't know if extraterresial/UFO kind of thing... but it wasn't from this reality for sure. It's even hard to explain it with our (human) words, you would have see it yourself to understand.
Its car lights as it was found out to be.
My friend and I were sitting in his car about 500 feet away from this field where he told me about a "ghost" he saw. I didn't believe him, but all of the sudden an orange ball of light about the size of a musk melon appeared for a few seconds and then turned into a flowing, glowing, white light that hovered along the ground for another few seconds, slightly longer than the original light, that was in the shape of a long victorian women's dress. There was nothing unusual about the area this happened, just a regular grass field in rural ohio. Still only saw this or any similar phenomenon once in my life.
I honestly love this myth busting videos! As some one who was raised SUPER religious and therefore told to "just believe" the unbelievable, I find myself today feeling a great sense of calm when the truth is revealed using science, math, logic, and reason!
Thanks Joe!
I'm Australian, when I was a kid my aboriginal friend told me about the time a ball of light followed his family through the bush, his parents told me to never go near the lights, it still gives me chills
I haven't seen ghost lights but I did see a rather spectacular display of silent, moving lights in one area of the sky one night in Tucson, Arizona. I couldn't tell how far vs. how large they were. I watched for a looooong time, fixing on them until I just couldn't anymore. Eventually I realized that they were in the direction of the Air Force base there... so, probably a night time drone practice.
Camping last year, I saw what looked like a flaming comet. What threw me off was that it was slower moving and I could clearly see flames. Probably this same phenomenon described in the video (reflection off a distant campfire or something) but it was a really odd thing to experience.
"It's just an illusion, a trick, a trick of the light
what you now see is really out of sight
It's dark, it's evil, possessive and kind
Something that you give me keeps me alive
Both ends burning, burning so bright tonight
And my world keeps turning, turning inside out
And I can't break the chain
I've gotta break the chain
I'm trying to break the chain
God help me break the chain"
Awesome as always
I think it’s amazing that people saw something fascinating and wanted to try to figure out how it works and what it is. That some people have devoted parts of their life to answering the mystery is also incredible. And now you get to make a video on it and share it all with us. ❤
The only weird lights in the sky I've ever seen were definitely Northern Lights on the rare times they've been visible at my latitude. I _have_ seen the "hey, that boat looks like it's several meters above Lake Erie" thing. Sometimes you just can't tell where exactly the horizon is, either.
I used to live in Isaan, Thailand. And I have been to that festival and seen the lights (not at the festival though). I guess the reason why these lights dont have a "scary" folklore around it is that its very obvious when you see them that it is some sort of natural phenomenon. Just the way they behave seems like how lights would behave if there were some gasses or electrical disturbance etc.
I used to see an orb of light that would fly over my head occasionally when I would get out of my car to close the gate to my property in East Texas on my way to work really early in the morning. I was out in the sticks on a country road surrounded by thick forest with nobody else around so car headlights don't make sense.
When I was about 5 yrs old in South Texas my mother, aunt and younger cousin watched a huge fireball roar slowly across the sky one night- we still talk about it this day… I was too young to know whether it was reported in the local papers, I assume it was … this would have been around 1973 give or take a year… any Texans out there recall this? It was awesome 🤩
This is a great topic for @TheWhyFiles - a channel on youtube that really stands out and researches strange phenomenon and ghosts etc. Worth checking out and heck, you guys could collaborate! I'd actually love to see something like that.
This happened in 2016, but it is burned into my memory forever. I was at the Washington county fair in Minnesota, close to the dining pavilion at just after dusk when I saw a soft glowing white orb the size of a soccer ball slowly floating past about three feet in front of me and about three feet above the concession stand that I was standing next to. It was a perfect orb that just slowly floated in a straight path from my right to my left, passing less than ten feet from me as it went overhead. It was probably going about three or four miles per hour, so I could have followed it at a walking pace, but I just watched it float away down the row of concession stands.
I've seen a roughly basketball sized one, light blue in color, hovering about 7 feet from me roughly a foot off the ground. Did yours have holes or dark spots on its surface?
Edit: added "or dark spots" since it was night, so it could have been holes or dark spots, i couldnt tell.
So dozens of other people saw it ?