Talk:Brown Mountain lights

Could not be light refractions due to the existance of the lights before the common use of electricity. An episode of unsolved mysteries that aired a segment on the Brown Mtn lights debunked the candlewatt reflection experiment in 1977.

There is also an excellent source to ellaborate on this article:

http://www.ibiblio.org/ghosts/bmtn_p2.html

This article appears biased towards LEMUR research. The referenced Electric Spacecraft is not a respected journal (http://www.electricspacecraft.com/journal.htm) but closer to a hobbyist publication. The explaination of intersecting "discharges" spinning in the visible spectrum makes no sense at all. Plasma discharges are a viable explaination -- IEEE Spectrum has an article describing lights caused by electrical discharges creating plasma before earthquakes. However, this article's description is incomplete and confusing.
 * I have referenced LEMUR's material as claims rather than fact. LuckyLouie 00:47, 5 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. I've taken first steps to correct this, but more work is needed.  Is "Electric Space Craft" even peer-reviewed?  LEMUR does ghost hunting and is a commercial group.  A couple years ago they were selling the video they claimed to have taken of the lights.  None of these things means they're not doing good science, but I think it suggests they have a high burden to show that they are doing good science. Allen 17:57, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

There is also a burden of finding a solid source for finding information concerning BML. I think there too many alternate sources that may be less than reputable. I originally posted the first entry in discussion being my first foray into the world of Wikki. It pleased me to see a timely revision.


 * I suggest looking into the entry for Joshua P. Warren. (a) He's a self-proclaimed "scientist. (b) There is much of what appears to be pseudoscience being claimed as fact. LuckyLouie 08:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

1913?
From an article at []

"Modern investigations started at the request of some US Congressmen to the U.S. Geologic Survey. Two investigations were made, the first in 1913 and the second in 1922."

I cross-checked this with various other articles, finding it to be correct. If a first investigation into the cause of the lights was made in the year 1913, surely they must have been observed for some time before that year, countering the Wikipedia article's claim that they were first observed in 1913?

In fact, from various sources, the earliest accounts from Europeans were during the 1770s. Native American accounts date much further, for obvious reasons. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.132.201.131 (talk • contribs)


 * Please clarify what these "various sources" are. The history of the Brown Mountain Lights is controversial, so it's crucial that we cite the sources of all claims that the lights were seen before the 1900s.  --Allen 16:38, 24 July 2006 (UTC)


 * https://www.ncpedia.org/brown-mountain-lights. States it was first documented in 1833 but no source given. 2603:6080:6602:9055:B055:1D7F:6A57:528B (talk) 20:37, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Removed Unsourced Material
I just removed some unsourced material, including the following: "In later decades, reports of the Brown Mountain Lights continued. An experiment conducted in 1977 shone a 50,000 candela floodlight 22 miles (35 km) towards Brown Mountain. Experimenters saw a red, circular light floating above the horizon, and thus concluded that refraction of ordinary lights were likely to blame for the Brown Mountain Lights." I removed this text reluctantly, because I once talked to someone involved with this research, and it sounds like it probably did happen, and is potentially important. Still, the closest to a reliable source I can find is this, and it just doesn't seem reliable enough. But I'm leaving it here on the talk page in case anyone has a more appropriate source. --Allen (talk) 23:30, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Removed the following unsourced statment until someone can find the source:

"In 2000, a woman called into the county 911 office of liesville, NC. The woman speech was reported as being slurred and the conversation was broke up due to signal loss. She stated her family saw mysterious lights, her husband was missing, and that her family was in need of help.  The local police department reported to the area, but only found an abandoned vehicle where the were obvious signs of a struggle.  The case was soon closed. The patrons of the vehicle were never found."

Graham1973 (talk) 16:57, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Brown Mountain cameras, and low quality local journalism
Regarding this edit,, there are low quality local tv station reports about "lights" having being captured on two occasions. This example from 2019 is obviously someone flying drones, which anyone can buy on Amazon now, in front of the camera, and it just seems kind of embarrassing that the local media bought it wholesale. And we have video of a light from 2016 that could be possibly be an aircraft landing light 100 miles away--why haven't the Appalachian State people published a distance estimate from parallax? They ought to be able to do that, both cameras recorded it at the same time. The historical Brown Mountain lights were seen every clear night, you'd think several years' of nightly camera footage would have produced a lot more than this if they were real. Actually, the guy in charge of the cameras has acknowledged that they haven't caught much. Geogene (talk) 09:35, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Biased article
This wikipedia article seems biased 169.136.42.220 (talk) 18:10, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay, what words or phrasing should be corrected to make it non-bias? --WashuOtaku (talk) 18:33, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
 * See WP:FRINGE, Academic bias, and NPOV means neutral editing, not neutral content. Geogene (talk) 22:24, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree. The entire article continually refers to the phenomena as basically being nonexistent and being imagined or pushed forth by the gullible or those seeking monetary reward.  The insistence within this article of using explanations, such as train lights, which have already been debunked, along with the insistence that people are only seeing campers or headlights, etc...is not consistent with the majority of observers who have actually viewed the lights.  I have.  I did not go expecting to see them, as I'm not one who experiences that sort of thing, but in 2011 I was with a group of people at one of the overlooks at Watchman's View, with a view of Table Rock and as night fell, we all very clearly saw, for some period of time, a repeated number of what looked like floating balls of light, with different hues to them, which appear out of nowhere, hovering OVER the edge of the mountain, and then would just sort of roll downwards, in the air, as the light disappeared.  There are no more trains left and I can guarantee there were no cars or campers or brush fires that were creating a multi-colored, evanescent ball of light that hovers at a high altitude with nothing below it but the very deep Linville Gorge.  This article is written as if the Lights are an invention of hillbillies who didn't understand the new-fangled invention of electricity, instead of citing the MULTIPLE scientific articles debating the cause of this as well as the numerous people who have personally experienced the phenomenon.  Instead, the article reads as if The Brown Mountain Lights do not exist and are merely reports of simpletons with active imaginations.  They do exist, they have been reported for hundreds of years and are still seen to this day.  The bias in this article which ignores any research to the contrary view of this author and that the article actually seems to deny the Lights even exist makes it undeniably biased and provides inaccurate information to the public. 204.152.2.230 (talk) 17:06, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I note that you didn't actually cite any sources here. Your own experiences, while certainly interesting, cannot be the basis for changes to a Wikipedia article.  Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 17:15, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
 * You claim there are "MULTIPLE scientific articles" debating this, but all I see in Google Scholar is the Mansfield report from 1922 and the Speer book. And both of those sources say there was never anything mysterious there. Geogene (talk) 20:16, 3 July 2023 (UTC)