Theories flew Saturday about the ghostly lights seen prowling the slopes of Brown Mountain since antiquity.
At a symposium on the so-called Brown Mountain Lights, the suspects ranged from the scientific to the fanciful - radon gas, campfires, ball lightning, even UFOs.
Whatever is up there, it's real to Steve Woody. He had a rare close encounter with the lights in the autumn of 1961. He was 12 and on the mountain with his father, waiting for dawn to go deer hunting.
About 4:30 a.m., with heavy sleet falling, they both saw two lights silently wandering through the trees toward their truck.
"It was a peaceful experience," recalled Woody, now 62. "They were soft, pleasing orange lights, perfectly round, about four feet in diameter."
A memorable experience, he said, for a day when they bagged no deer.
Brown Mountain, a lump in the wrinkles of the Blue Ridge, has attracted attention for centuries because of the phenomenon.
Folklore holds that Cherokee Indians thought they were seeing torches borne by the ghosts of grieving maidens. An early European explorer, a German surveyor named G.W. de Brahm, studied the mystery in 1771 and concluded it was "nitrous vapors which are borne by the wind."
In 1913, the U.S. Geologic Survey sent a representative to look into the lights. He concluded people were seeing refracted lights from locomotives of the Southern Railway. Three years later came the Great Flood of 1916, which washed away the theory.
Raging rivers swept away some of the Southern's tracks. Locomotives weren't running for a spell, but the lights kept chugging along. A study in 1916 concluded the glow was the result of "sulfurated hydrogen vapors" - swamp gas to you and me.
A mountainous battery
Joshua Warren, who hosts the "Speaking of Strange" show on Asheville radio and operates the Asheville Mystery Museum, has looked into the phenomenon of the lights for 20 years.
He presented results of multiple expeditions he's made. Measurement gizmos revealed strange electro-magnetic interference when the lights took the stage.
Warren believes the mineral makeup of the mountain - magnetic rocks, quartz and running water - may turn the terrain into a giant battery that discharges energy in the form of plasmatic displays.
He has heard hundreds of stories over the years about the lights.
One close-up view of the lights came from Tommie Hunter one night in 1982. While others in his party ran from the sparkly orb, Hunter drew closer and reached out to touch it. He said he'd felt like he'd stuck his finger in a socket, but felt no other ill effects.
Then there was the late Ralph Lael, who ran the Outer Space Rock Shop Museum in the foothills and ran for Congress in 1948. He claimed he was invited into the mountain by aliens who took him for a ride in a flying saucer, a trip made more palatable by attractive female E.T.s in bikinis.
In a box in the backroom of his museum, Lael kept what he said was a mummified alien or, alternatively, a pygmy's corpse. Either way, people paid to see it.
Dan Caton, an astronomy professor from Appalachian State University, said most reports of the Brown Mountain Lights are bogus.
Campfires, headlights, aircraft, even the lights of distant Lenoir are often mistaken for the lights, he said. Maybe 5 percent of the reports are legitimate and scientific documentation is lacking.
Caton favors the notion of ball lighting, a little-understood but long-observed phenomenon. He has interviewed people who describe misty or fireworks-like apparitions about as big as a beach ball floating up the mountainside, a good account of ball lightning. Why it occurs with regularity in the Linville Gorge, he said, needs to be further explored.
Caton also questions the Indian legends often cited in the history of the lights.
"Cherokees didn't write down stuff. It was an oral tradition." Caton said he's looked through hundreds of pages of Indian myth. "Why is this one real and the one on the next page about the flying horse not real?"
Whatever is up there, Brown Mountain serves a good purpose in a busy world. If offers an intriguing puzzle, Warren said.
"Regardless of what is true and what is not true, the thing that makes the Brown Mountain Lights mystery so great, so important, is that it is this blank slate upon which you can project your imagination."
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