My Home, NC | Mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights

My Home, NC, a PBS North Carolina series about the state’s people and places, posted this short film in January 2016. It gathers people who have spent years looking for the lights reported over Brown Mountain in western North Carolina, from locals who grew up hearing adults describe them to Charles Braswell Jr., who says that on roughly his 35th trip to an overlook on N.C. 181 he finally saw – and photographed – what he believed was a Brown Mountain light.

Dan Caton, a professor of physics and astronomy, and his observatory engineer Lee Hawkins explain their cameras and their aim: to separate genuine anomalies from the man-made and natural lights most visitors see, and then look for links with weather or the ionosphere. C. W. Smith, a former recreation technician for the U.S. Forest Service, takes the crew to Wiseman’s View, where he first saw the lights while on patrol, and the film ends as the weather closes in.

Caton’s remark that the myth will outlive any explanation sums up the Brown Mountain lights. Most sightings have well-studied ordinary causes – train and car headlights seen across the gorge, brush fires, beacons and, today, hikers’ headlamps in Linville Gorge – and the film’s own scientist says most of what visitors see falls into that category.

Treat the eyewitness accounts with care. The people here are sincere, but judging the distance and movement of a single light in darkness is notoriously unreliable – the autokinetic effect makes a fixed point seem to drift.