Seeing The Lights

Unusual lights in the sky may be related to activity deep within the earth - and an advance team of scientists is checking it out.

One of the many crazy things I'm up to is to go to places around the world where people are reporting unusual lights in the sky (which they only sometimes call UFOs). These places are often remote and wild, such as the Australian Outback. I go on behalf of ICRL, the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (soon to have its own Web site), and I am usually accompanied by a scientist or technical expert of some kind, and one or two other colleagues. When we get to a destination, we question everybody in the vicinity, including (indeed, especially) local indigenous people such as Aborigines and Indians. It is important we get enough information to assess whether or not there really is something unusual going on, or if the preliminary reports we received were incorrect or exaggerated.

Sometimes we find that there is no basis to those reports, but on the occasions when we think there is a genuine possibility of some unusual, unexplained phenomenon taking place, we set ourselves up at what we learn are the most suitable locations for skywatching, and deploy our equipment.

This might consist of a widespread array of still cameras so that if anything is seen, we get shots from different angles and thus are able to calculate the distance and size of the object. We will have a video camera, too, and we will have another still camera fitted with a diffraction filter. This produces a rainbow spectrum from any light source photographed and records it on film. Experts can often determine what gases are contained within a light-producing phenomenon by examining such spectra. We usually have a magnetometer on hand to check if there are any odd fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field, and perhaps also a spectrum analyzer so that if we do see anything, we can check what radio frequencies might be being emitted from it.

Our aim is always to confirm whether or not unexplained phenomena are actually occurring, and, if they are, to bring back a range of scientifically useful data and observations. These field trips are of a pilot, exploratory nature designed to see if a more substantial scientific presence is required.

In August this year, I found myself near the foot of Popocatapetl, a great, steaming volcano 100 km or so east of Mexico City. I was accompanied by the Norwegian engineer, Erling Strand, director of Project Hessdalen. This project started life in the early 1980s, when people in the remote Norwegian valley of Hessdalen began reporting strange lights. Strand was one of those who formed a field research unit which undertook prolonged observations in the snowy, craggy valley. Dozens of photographs of bizarre lightforms were taken, radar contact made with some of them, and other instrumental data obtained. Some of the lights were visible for an hour or more, slowly floating back and forth in front of mountain precipices, sometimes touching down lightly on rocky ridges where they became transparent, then floating upwards again when they assumed more brilliance. But after a couple of years, the incidence of light phenomena decreased, and the team was disbanded.

Strand was disappointed that the world community of scientists did not take greater notice of these remarkable events, or of the evidence Project Hessdalen had managed to collect. On the other hand, the ufological community was so besotted with the idea of ET craft, they didn't really want to know about unexplained flying objects. A couple of years ago, however, reports of lights started to come out of Hessdalen once more (though not on the scale of the previous decade), and Strand set up a second Project Hessdalen. The creation of specialist automatic equipment is being conducted as work projects in Strand's engineering college at Ostfold, and slowly, as and when funding allows, the Hessdalen valley is being fitted out with automatic monitoring stations. The aim is to have the whole, six-mile-long valley "wired" so that remote observations can be made to spot and monitor any unusual lights that may appear. This will eventually be on the World Wide Web, so you can log in and watch for light phenomena in real time from the comfort of your own computer! Right now, you can find out about Project Hessdalen at Web site http://www.hiof.no/crulp/prosjekter/Hessdalen/.

I had been involved with the investigation of these strange lights -- which resemble ball lightning and earthquake lights but have their own characteristics, too -- for about the same length of time as Strand. I call them "earth lights" and have written two books on the subject -- Earth Lights, Turnstone, UK, 1983, and Earth Lights Revelation, Blandford Press, UK, 1989. The Ley Hunter journal (leyhunt@aol.com, soon to have its own Web site) also carries update reports on the subject area, and issue 114 was a special issue on earth lights. So Strand and I team up for fieldwork whenever we can and whenever the funding is available. On this Mexican trip, we were also accompanied by physicist David Fryberger from Stanford and a TV crew from Britain's Channel Four flagship documentary series, Equinox. We had been making a documentary on earth lights for some time, and as a climax to the show, the TV people wanted to film us actually on one of our expeditions. We had heard rumors emerging from the Valley of Mexico about UFOs, so picked that area to see what was going on.

We encountered problems both human and natural. As we investigated the Mexican UFO "flap," which had been going on for a few years, we realized it was as much or more a sociological phenomenon than an anomalous natural one.

On 11 July, 1991, there had been a solar eclipse visible from central Mexico, and many people filmed it with their video cameras. Much of this footage showed an apparent glowing object in the sky as the moon eclipsed the solar disk, darkening it and, without the solar glare, rendering things in the sky more visible. It was later conclusively shown that Venus was in exactly this part of the sky at that time, and, moreover, people filmed the thing from locations separated by as much as 150 km, so it wasn't some local object hovering over Mexico City. Yet many people were convinced that the videos were proof of a UFO in the skies above Mexico City, and a huge UFO wave developed. This was inadvertently aided and abetted by Jaime Maussan, a TV producer, who had been impressed with the eclipse films, and invited all and sundry to look out for UFOs in the Mexican skies and to video them and send him the footage, on the understanding that he would broadcast the better pieces. When we spoke to Maussan, he had received some 6,000 video sequences!

This process had in itself created a huge surge of interest in things seen in the sky, and so the reports we had heard before arriving in Mexico were undoubtedly an artifact of this media-sociological interest. But was there a real phenomenon buried in all this hype? We looked at some examples of footage that had been received by Maussan, who is a pleasant and sincere man who clearly believes there is a lot of UFO activity over Mexico. We felt, however, that he was less than discriminating about the material he had received. We were not impressed by most of the video sequences we saw, but a few were difficult to explain, and one or two really did seem to show unusual phenomena. So perhaps there was something going on down Mexico way....

There was another reason for suspecting that there might be something in it all -- Popocatapetl. The name means "the smoking one," and the mountain had been known to all the ancient cultures of the Valley of Mexico. Its occasional eruptions had destroyed some of them. El Popo is becoming active again, and is under intense scientific scrutiny. As recently as April, 1996, five climbers where killed in one of its eruptions. A Popocatapetl monitoring geologist told us that there were many mini-quakes around the volcano every day, that it was producing 10,000 tons of sodium dioxide daily. El Popo was stirring again. This was potentially significant, because the appearance of earth lights often seems related to seismic activity. Earthquake lights can sometimes appear just before, during or after a major earthquake, but it seems earth lights can appear with just relatively minor stressing of the Earth's crust. Also, light phenomena have been seen (and even filmed) in association with volcano eruptions on numerous occasions. It is worth bearing in mind that Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting of glittering flying disks, the event which gave rise to the term "flying saucers," occurred along the Cascade range in Washington state, which is a chain of volcanoes -- and where years later, Mount St. Helens would erupt with such fury. So we realized that the growing activity of El Popo might be the "motor" driving an increased appearance of light phenomena, which may well be submerged within the general Mexican "uforia."

On one occasion, we went part of the way up the 16,000-foot volcano and marveled at its awesome beauty. Its snow cap glistened and white steam and wisps of blue-tinged smoke lazily drifted out of its crater. We finally set up our observation station about 10 km from the base of the El Popo. But our observational work was hampered by bad weather for much of our ten-day stay: a hurricane in nearby Vera Cruz brought low clouds and terrible electrical storms on numerous occasions, blotting out sight of the volcano all together. We got pretty wet and despondent, but we also found that the local people saw lights quite regularly, and they didn't place then in a UFO context. In one village, the lights are fairly frequently seen coming down the valley and are interpreted as being the spirits of night-flying witches. This type of interpretation is common among traditional peoples. The Penobscot Indians of Maine, U.S.A., for instance, claimed that balls of light seen in the night sky were shamans flying out on nocturnal battles, the exact same explanation given to mysterious lights by the Saami people of Lapland.

So we became pretty sure that there were real light phenomena taking place in the region, but on what scale or frequency, we could not determine. Moreover, the monitoring geologist on El Popo told us that he had himself seen strange flashes of lights off the peaks and ridges around the volcano.

Our luck changed on the last day we were in Mexico. The weather cleared up and the day was vividly clear and bright. But we had a shock -- El Popo's snowcap had disappeared overnight! By the afternoon, the wispy steam emissions had changed to rolling clouds of smoke. The great volcano was putting on a show for us. We observed and monitored eagerly that evening as darkness fell. Our magnetometer picked up what seemed to be bizarre fluctuations in the magnetic field around the volcano (tests at many miles distant showed nothing unusual). But no lights. The TV crew left Fryberger, Strand and myself to our monitoring as they trekked back the good distance to the hotel to pack their equipment. We stayed but saw nothing, so I packed my cameras, and Strand was starting to pack away his instruments. Then we suddenly saw flashes of light on the lower slopes of El Popo. Clear and distinct, and rapidly flashing. In excited mayhem, we tried to pull out our cameras in time to catch the phenomenon, and did manage a few blurred pictures and snatches of video footage. None of us thought we were seeing earth lights proper, but we agreed that it did look like some extraordinary discharge phenomenon, indicating unusual conditions. When we got back to the hotel and informed the crew, the director got up and calmly announced he felt ready to commit suicide! Murphy's law rules, even on earth lights expeditions!

Anyhow, you can see how it all came out for yourselves. The film screens on Channel Four in Britain on one of the first two Sundays in November, and it will appear on Discovery Channel in the U.S.A. a little later. Don't miss it!

Paul Devereux is the author of many books, including Earth Lights Revelation; Places of Power; Earth Memory; Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places; Symbolic Landscapes, Shamanism and the Mystery Lines; and The New Ley Hunter's Guide. He is a consultant and main contributor for Earth's Mysterious Places, Volume 8 of the Reader's Digest Quest for the Unknown series. He has also co-authored several books and contributed chapters to others. Mr. Devereux is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Full Member of the society for Scientific Exploration (USA), Member of the Scientific and Medical Network, and is a Research member of International Consciousness Research Laboratories.