Spook(y) Lights Near Joplin, MO

Factual Questions
1

At the risk of having this thread transferred to Great Debates, I’ll open it here.

I’d also like to hear Cecil weigh in on this.

Along a dirt road, out in the woods, a few miles south and west of Joplin, Missouri, a strange light has been appearing for over a century. Dubbed “The Spook Light” (Missourians tend to get to the point), from a distance it resembles a lantern, but up close it looks like a basketball-sized ball of, uh, light. It moves about randomly yet slowly and deliberately, as if guided by some sort of intelligence.

I lived in Joplin, MO for 7 years. Despite numerous excursions out into the woods to go see it, I only saw it once. Pretty creepy, but not terrifying.

There are a few explanations, but none of them are good.

  1. It’s ball lightning. But doesn’t ball lightning only appear under certain atmospheric conditions? The spook light appears year 'round.

  2. It’s an optical illusion- it’s really lights from nearby Interstate 44. Intersate 44 is miles away, and besides that, they’ve been seeing this thing since the 1890’s.

  3. It has something to do with as-yet-not-fully-understood properties of swamp gas. OK, but do they have spook lights in Florida, Louisiana, and anywhere else where there are swamps or bogs?

  4. It’s the ghost of a murdered Indian, an old moonshiner, a pioneer woman, etc. Uh-huh.

Anyone else care to float a theory or post a link to some current research on the subject?

2

Must be a lot of good weed in southwestern Mo.

It’s a long way to heaven, but only three short steps to hell.

3

I’ve heard of several similar things, like the Marfa lights in TX, the Brown Mountain lights in NC, (and many others) and I’ve heard pretty much the same theories. An additional theory I’ve heard is that the light is caused by static charge created by friction along fault lines.

I’ve seen the Brown Mountain lights myself. I’ve heard them described similarly to the spook light you mentioned, but the time I saw them it was different. I was a few miles away from the mountain, and there were these flashes of light occuring at the top of the mountain. Out of the flashes, a spark of light would shoot up parabolically, then disappear. (No, it wasn’t the 4th of July). It was happening with an intense frequency at times, but none of them were that bright (from my distance, anyway).

I’ve heard the theory of refracted light from nearby roads applied to Brown Mtn. as well (it was studied by the USGS earlier this century, and I believe that was their conclusion), but that explanation doesn’t satisfy my description of the lights. I’ve also heard that Native Americans reported seeing these lights hundreds of years ago.

4

It may be a mistake to think that all sightings of the light are one phenomenon. Sometimes it might have been Venus (evenings and morning), or Jupiter (have a look outside – it’s amazingly bright right now).

Other times, it could have been a firefly sitting on a branch. You might object, “But fireflies flash on and off!” An observer seeing it sitting on a tree branch might suppose that his line of sight to an apparently far more distant object is being cut off sporadically by the motion of the leaves in the wind.

Sometimes it might have been somebody wandering around with an actual lantern.

The problem is, once the idea of “The Spook Light” took hold, it pretty much guaranteed that there would be sightings. People were on the look-out for odd things, and were thus more prone to interpret the odd glimmer as “The Spook Light”.

I am tempted to make a comparison to the rash of Elvis sightings to illustrate that once an idea takes hold there will be people who see it, but to be honest, I’m not sure there are that many Elvis sightings. I think it’s more of a joke. But I could be wrong.

5

I hadn’t heard of this prior to your post. I found a couple of sites that address this phenomenon.

http://springfieldmo.about.com/local/midwestus/springfieldmo/library/weekly/aa081698.htm

http://www.nacomm.org/news/1997/qtr1/hsl.htm

Note that a lot of what the above will lead you to was not written be skeptical folk. But you’ve given me an idea for a cheap mini-vacation.

The Marfa lights, as well as I can tell from both written sources and the accounts of a few friends, are headlights.

6

Better not book your hotel room just yet, Beatle. The Hornet Spook Light is, to anthropomorphize, very temperamental. In other words, it doesn’t come out every night. Seven years in Joplin, and about 30 excursions into the woods, and I saw the damned thing ONCE! It was worth it, though.

7

Well, beatle, I’ll have to give you a testimonial of my own regarding the Marfa Lights… I’ve been out to the Marfa Lights viewing area countless times and quite a few of those times, I’ve seen both what I am convinced are lights from traffic and what I know cannot be cars. Lights from cars moving northbound on Hwy 90 from Presidio to Marfa are uniformily in the same area on the western horizon and never vary from whitish in color. Most lights seen to the south are silhouetted against or rise just above a late Cenozoic fault scarp. Unlike the “auto-genic” lights, these have variable colors (yellow-red-white-green most commonly), often change colors mid-flight, dance eratically, split into two, merge into one, suddenly brighten, suddenly fade, etc. I don’t what what they are, but they certainly aren’t cars (the area is exceedingly desolate). I’ve gone out and watched tourists “ooh” and “aah” at the highway lights, missing the less frequent and more spectacular “true” Marfa lights–but why correct them? I’ve seen the lights several times, but they’ve only been significantly interesting once or twice.

Most of the “theories” for the Joplin lights mentioned by rastahomie are also cited for the Marfa lights–Apache ghost fires, Apache ghosts, swamp gas (in the desert???), refracted light, etc. Two others here are also frequently mentioned:

(1) so-called “Earthquake Lights”… since the Marfa lights are seen in the vicinity of a somewhat recent (but not historic) fault scarp, some have hypothesized that very low frequencies are generated by movement along the fault, which does something or other to water vapor in the air that causes it to suddenly illuminate. Allegedly, this has been reproduced in a lab somewhere. And–from my personal experience–the lights are more active shortly after rain. But: motion along the Santa Fe fault has not been detected at any of the nearby seismic stations!

(2) “Whistlers”… something roughly akin to phenomena like the aurora borealis, whereby cosmic radiation just happens to get caught up in some type of magnetic vortex near Marfa which is manifest as the lights. These guys call 'em “whistlers” because they claim they can hear the lights as a whistling noise on special ultra-high frequency recievers right before they appear.

One local citizen says that they’re actually UFO’s that are flying out of one of Hell’s gates, that just happens to be located approximately halfway between Alpine and Marfa, TX.

No matter what these things really are, the viewing area is one hell of a good place for high school kids and undergrads to drink beer, etc. I suspect that that is what the Marfa lights share most in common with the Joplin lights…

Pantellerite

8

Oh heck, Pantellerite, now I’m going to have to go and see for myself (isn’t Missouri the “show me” state?). With the atlas at the office I’m not sure at present if Marfa or Joplin is closer.

I haven’t thought my way through it, but I’ll say at the moment the quake lights hypothesis sounds like the most intriguing. Headlights and beer lites may account for much of what is seen, but if there’s something else, I guess I want to know.

9

Here’s a site that discusses the earthquake/strange lights phenomenon in some detail:

Tectonic Strain Theory

Basically, it states there is a high occurence of strange lights and UFO sightings in areas where earthquake faults coincide with quartz bearing rock, creating a piezo-electric effect that produces plasmas that fly throught the air.

TT

“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide

10

Here…

Very interesting pictures and even a video clip you can watch…

11

Just got my October issue of Earth Observation Magazine and there’s an article by John S. Janks that uses some remote sensing techniques to explain the Marfa lights. EOM’s website is many months behind, so I’ll have to summarize.

Alto Technology Resources overflew the area both during daylight and at night with a hyperspectral sensor. While the night flight was underway, an observer on the ground at the Marfa Lights Observation Area recorded the lights. While the lights were clearly visible on the ground, neither the pilot nor the hyperspectral sensor detected them, which rules out almost all pinpoint light sources, including lanterns, phosphorescent minerals, burning methane, St. Elmo’s fire and ball lightning.

Volcanic materials as well as recent sediments and soils characterize the area, including reflective white soils occurring along the mesas and slopes. Using USGS Digital Orthoquads (DOQs) draped over Digital Elevation Models (DEM), Janks produced a 3D digital perspective model.

Areas of white reflective soils were colored red on the DOQ data, and the model examined. There are two large such areas, and they are where the lights are most often seen from the Observation Area. Janks concludes that:

12

Have you thought of Aurora’s?
Occasionally CME’s can cause Solar Radiation storms, (which are reported by the news media as Auroras to keep the public from freaking out over the “radiation” word) that are visible in locations you’d never typically witness an Aurora. In fact, I witness one last year, here in nashville.

13

I like the ball lightening theory also - though i’ve only seen that once - and it scared the piss out of me.

14

Thanks for the bump, Ringo! If you wouldn’t mind, could you provide a full citation for that article so I can order it by Interlibrary Loan?

(Sigh…) It seems that my early 20’s, mystical experiences watching the Marfa Lights were just an excuse to drive out into the middle of nowhere and… and we’ll just leave it at that.

Just nobody tell the Marfa Chamber of Commerce; Lights or no, the “Marfa Lights Festival” is one hell of a Labor Day party!

Ringo–again, thanks!

15

FTR, Fierra and I plan on going down to investigate the Joplin sppoklight/Hornet Light/Tri-State light/whatever next Spring/Summer. We will be taking some scientific devices too, in case we see it…and something most people apparently don’t seem to take - a freaking video camera.

I mean really. As many people as there are that see it, and as many video cameras as are out there, and there’s no good video of it? Yes, I’ve seen one video on the web, and it was absolutely worthless. Somehow, people can find the time to videotape their dog taking a shit, but not a glowing uber-creepy energy ball of doom? Yeah, you wouldn’t want to show that to anyone…

I plan on taking some serious amount of video and 4 MPixel shots of it if it decides to appear for us.

16

I’m not sure you’ll be able to get the article through Interlibrary Loan, Pantellerite, as I cannot find an ISSN (nor, for that matter, a publisher’s address). It’s a magazine that I never subscribed to; I think someone at a convention got one of my business cards and made a subscriber out of me.

Here’s the rest of the info: Earth Observation Magazine, The Mysterious Marfa Lights - A Riddle Solved by Remote Sensing, John S. Janks, pp. 31-32, Volume 11 Number 10, October 2002.

If you can’t get it, I’ll be glad to scan it and email it to you (it’s only two pages).

17

When I lived in St. Louis, one day me & my peeps were looking through a book titled Weird America. We looked up Missouri and read about the Hornet Spook Light. So on the spur of the moment we decided to go and check it out.

We reached the area in the daytime and found where the little village of Hornet used to be, not far from the Oklahoma state line. Nothing but woods there now. We saw a farmer at the edge of the woods and asked where Hornet was. He said, “You’re in it.” We asked a rural gas-station attendant about the light. If it was for real. He laughed, and through his laughter managed to say “Oh, it’s there.” (Thinking: Ha, another buncha suckers from the city.)

We parked on that lonely one-lane country road where the light is reputed to be seen. Stayed there all night. Nothing. I stared so hard in the night trying to see it, I nearly autosuggested my brain into thinking I could see it, but had to admit I saw nothing there.

There aren’t any swamps in that area, you know.

18

Thanks for the cite, Ringo. I’ve been looking for it, too; I have found that only 48 libraries in the nation subscribe to it (at least, according to GeoRef), so ILL may be out of the question.

If you wouldn’t mind giving it a scan and sending me an e-mail, I’d appreciate it! My e-mail is in my profile.