Brown Mountain lights
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 📍 Place
Contents 5
| Type | Place |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Brown Mountain |
The Brown Mountain lights are lights reported near Brown Mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Two US Geological Survey investigations, in 1913 and 1922, concluded that they were distant train and car headlights and brush fires. Local legends about them have kept growing.[1][2]
Origins
The earliest known published reference is a September 1913 report in the Charlotte Daily Observer of red lights appearing just above the horizon every night.[1][2] Historical travel accounts of the region before 1900 do not mention such lights, and the stories began as electric lighting and railways spread through the area.[1] Some writers have suggested that Jules Verne's novel Master of the World, translated into English in 1911, which features strange lights on nearby Table Rock, may also have played a part.[1]
Investigations
In 1913 USGS employee D. B. Sterrett found that the headlights of Southern Railway locomotives would have been visible from Loven's Hotel, from which many sightings were made, and that the timing matched train schedules.[1] Locals were unconvinced, and in 1922 the USGS sent geologist George R. Mansfield. Using an alidade telescope and a map, he showed that the lights seen during his visit were car and train headlights and brush fires. One light that appeared to move and flare proved stationary through the telescope; another matched a curve in a railway line and a scheduled train time.[1][2]
Legends
After Mansfield's report, local writers began publishing stories that placed the lights before electrification. A claim that Native Americans knew of the lights first appeared in 1938 without any source, and ghost stories linking the lights to murdered women, lost soldiers and a faithful enslaved man followed over the decades.[1][2] Scotty Wiseman's 1961 song "The Legend of the Brown Mountain Lights" made them North Carolina's best-known ghost story.[1]
Recent research
Appalachian State University set up low-light cameras overlooking Brown Mountain and Linville Gorge. By 2014 they had recorded 6,300 hours of data without capturing any unexplained lights.[1] Investigator Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2016, traced how the lights and the explanations for them had changed over time.[2]
References
- Brown Mountain lights — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Joe Nickell, "The Brown Mountain Lights: Solved! (Again!)", Skeptical Inquirer (2016) · skepticalinquirer.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 31 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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