southern gentleman | UNEXPLAINED LIGHTS
Lights in The Sky By Jason Frye | Photography courtesy of Burke County Tourism
UFOs and other nighttime aerial mysteries have plagued the South for decades. October’s chill night air always puts me in the mood for a ghost story. Maybe it was the stack of books I pored over as a kid, reading page upon page of tales of ghosts and specters, haints and witches, and, of course, UFOs and unexplained lights. Maybe it was the stories I heard around the fire at Boy Scout campouts. Or maybe I, like everyone else, wants an answer to the unexplained things around us. I’ll save the story about that time I was spooned by a ghost for another issue because I want to talk about UFOs (or UAPs — Unexplained Aerial Phenomena — as they’re called now, but we’re sticking to the tried-and-true UFO) and weird lights we see across the South. It must’ve been seven or eight years ago that I was in Morganton, North Carolina, researching my first travel guidebook when I got to talking about the Brown Mountain Lights with the director of tourism for Burke County, Ed Phillips. Ed and I parsed the details and recounted strange orbs and streaks of light on, around, and above Brown Mountain, just north of town and sightings and stories attributed to everyone from Cherokee and Catawba Native Americans to early settlers to Civil War veterans to whole Boy Scout Troops 68 DeSoto
to photographers for National Geographic, and even one of the most renowned paranormal investigators of our time. We settled on one fact: we’d never seen them. Fueled by a fantastic meal and a couple of beers, I asked Ed if we could drive up to the overlook for a while and continue the conversation there, with Brown Mountain off in the distance. We did. And it was chilly. Late-summer nights can be cold in the mountains and I was underdressed, so about an hour into our talk, we decided to head back to town. In the middle of packing up our chairs, Ed asked, “Did you see that?” “Yeah,” I said. “Tell me what you saw.” Ed wore an expression somewhere between wonderment and fear and I knew I had the same look. There, across the valley, following the ridgeline of Brown Mountain, a yellow orb. It was joined by another. They traced the shape of the mountain, moved up, reversed course. “That,” I said. And chill night air be damned, we unfolded our chairs and sat back down. For the next 45 minutes we were nearly speechless as we watched those two orbs go back and forth on the mountain,
