We both took pictures, and just like the batch I had taken the first night, these too, came out, contrary to the legend. Once we had finished, we tried walking down the road to the light, but after a mile or so, we gave up. The light wasn’t any closer, and I had already tried to approach it in a car.
Back at the museum, I ran into John Wysong, a long time Joplin resident. He was with his wife and son, and though he had first seen the light in 1955, he returned two or three times a year to look at it. This became a family outing.
James Wysong, the son, had also seen the light before, but his wife, from Arizona had not. She hadn’t even heard of the light until after she was married into the Wysong clan.
I asked her what she thought of it. She said, “I didn’t know what they were talking about. I really didn’t believe that I would see it but there it is. I don’t know what to make of it but I know there must be some kind of explanation for it.”
The younger Wysong said that he had tried to find out exactly what it was. One night he had tried to stalk it, but after only a few minutes had given up. He didn’t say it, but seemed to imply he didn’t really want to get too close to it. He didn’t know what he might discover and that had concerned him.
The older Mrs. Wysong leaned across the front seat of the van and said, “After studying it all these years, you would think that someone would be able to figure it out what it is. It’s a real mystery to me.”
Well, she was right. You would think that after all the studies someone would have a logical explanation for the Spooklight.
During the Second World War, the Army Corps of Engineers spent some time studying the Spooklight. Colonel Dennis E. McCunniff was interviewed in his headquarters at Camp Crowder and said, “I know that no one is going to like this, or even believe this, but we found a few interesting things about the Spooklight. We discovered that it is seen more frequently in the winter but I believe that is due to the lack of foliage. Leaves off the trees and that kind of thing. After looking at it, we’ve determined that it’s a refraction of light. An optical illusion.”
Well, maybe.
In 1960, William K. Underwood, a high school student from Carthage, Missouri, spent 400 hours studying the light for his high school science project. He claimed that the lights were from a section of highway going east out of Quapaw, Oklahoma, and directly west of the road where the Spooklight is seen. Underwood, with the help of his friends and family, designed a number of experiments to prove his theory. Using a spectroscopic photograph, Underwood discovered that the light was from an incandescent source. In other words, the light came from car headlights. This seems to corroborate the theory given by Colonel McCunniff.
He also had friends drive down the stretch of highway, some with colored filters on their headlights. He watched as they flashed signals at him that were reflected in the Spooklight, verifying, to some degree his theory.
Others, equipped with mirrors, binoculars and cameras made similar experiments. Given that the signals were flashed in random patterns so that those at the museum didn’t know exactly when they were coming or what the signals would be, it provided some dynamic evidence.
A Joplin resident, who didn’t want to be named, said that he believed the Spooklight to be some kind of magnetic aberration that caused an ionization of the atmosphere near it. That caused the gases to glow and could account for the reports that the light had been attracted to cars. The gases would have one electrical charge and the car would have the opposite. The problem was that the glow lasted for hours and that suggested it wasn’t an ionization. Besides, there was no real mechanism in the explanation to cause the glow. The air might be ionized, but that, in and of itself, does not cause it to glow.
Spooky Meadows, in 1969, told Bogue of the Globethat he had formed his own opinion of what, according to Bogue, “has baffled everyone from Army Engineers down to amateur scientists.” Meadows said, “It’s a light, of course. But the mystery is — what causes it?”
Most of those who live in Joplin will tell those who ask that there is no good explanation for the Spooklight. They will tell you that the Army studied it, as have scientists and investigators, but no one has explained it. They will tell you that it is probably some kind of a natural phenomenon, but they will refuse to identify exactly what that phenomenon is, preferring to sound somewhat skeptical while denying any and all explanations.
They will also mention, whenever an explanation is offered, that the light was there long before cars and electricity arrived on the scene. I could find no documentation to support that. The first of the newspaper articles and other documents are from the beginning of the twentieth century.
Those who live in Joplin are going to believe what they want to believe and they won’t listen to an outsider with an explanation. That attitude was typified on a call-in radio program originating in Joplin. One woman heard that we were there and wondered why we didn’t just stay home. The light wasn’t ours to study, but it was theirs. It belonged to Joplin. “If they want to study something, why don’t they do it at home and leave us alone,” she said.
Ted Philips and Big Amber
As many of you know, I was at the Illinois MUFON Symposium hosted by Sam and Julie Maranto (seen here) and held over the last weekend in May. One of the speakers there, Ted Phillips, was a man I had heard about for years but had never met. He was involved in investigating and documenting UFO landing trace cases. These would be cases in which the UFOs interacted with the environment and left some sort of physical evidence behind.
I was interested in what he had to say and was surprised when he didn’t begin telling us about some of the physical trace cases. Instead he talked of an ongoing investigation in which lights… nocturnal lights… are seen on a regular basis in a relatively confined geographic location.
My first thought was of the Joplin Spooklight (seen above). I’d spent time in Joplin investigating that. It was a phenomenon that appears nightly at a certain location outside of Joplin, Missouri. I’d photographed it, though people all told me you couldn’t take pictures of it. The solution for that case was as simple as atmospheric refraction and car headlights from a stretch of road several miles away. There is no doubt in my mind that the Joplin Spooklight has a mundane explanation. Many others have reached the same conclusion.
So I sat there listening to Phillips talk of his months long investigation, sure that some sort of mundane explanation would be offered. Lights in the night sky just didn’t do a thing for me.
But this wasn’t a repeat of the Spooklight that hung in the air in one location for hours on end. These were periodic lights that were seen in various locations doing various things. He called some of them amber lights.
Phillips said one thing that resonated with me. He said that he expected to see nothing when he got there because frequently these things do not show up for the investigators. But he had been told that they appeared irregularly, but they always, eventually appeared, if you were patient. And one night they did. He saw five of them and almost didn’t get any pictures of them.
Let me make a point here, and it is something that the non-believers always say. You had a camera right there and you didn’t use it. Phillips is an experienced investigator and he was standing right there with the video camera in his hand and thought nothing of it until the end of that sighting.