The mystery of the Brown Mountain lights

This episode of The Broadside, from WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio, was posted to the station’s YouTube channel in November 2024. It shares an episode made by the Atlas Obscura podcast in partnership with Visit North Carolina, following a self-described skeptic, the scientist Dan Caton, as he tries to solve the mystery of the lights reported over Brown Mountain in the Blue Ridge foothills.

Caton describes the bright, starlike light he saw on an early stop at a roadside overlook, the range of descriptions – flickering candles, rising globes, exploding balls of fire – and the theories floated by the Charlotte Observer in 1913. He explains why he thinks about 90 percent of reports are misidentified natural or man-made lights, how a working group set up time-lapse cameras overlooking the gorge, and the brief, bright flash two cameras recorded on the night of 16–17 July 2016. His favoured explanation for that event is ball lightning, and he ends with advice for would-be observers.

This is the most rigorous mainstream treatment of the lights available as video. Caton starts where skeptics do – most sightings are headlights, aircraft, fires and other ordinary lights seen across a deep valley, as U.S. Geological Survey studies concluded in 1913 and 1922 – and argues only that a small residue remains unexplained. Other investigators, such as Joe Nickell, argue that the residue has ordinary causes too.

Two cautions: the episode dates the Charlotte Observer’s early coverage to February 1913, while the first published report usually cited is the paper’s article of 24 September 1913; and a single camera event, however intriguing, is not an explanation. Ball lightning is itself poorly understood, so it relabels the mystery rather than solving it.