![]() There are also early modern reports from Britain, such as the account given in his Journal of 1830 by the “peasant poet”, John Clare. ![]() In 1608, Edward Topskell argued that “dragons” were really “a weaker kind of lightning”. In 1590, Thomas Hill said they were “fumes kindled” giving the simulacrum of a flying dragon. In the 13th Century, for example, Albertus Magnus said the “dragons” were in actuality “vapours” that could roll into a ball and float up and down. In the way that the popular myth today is that unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are extra-terrestrial craft, then it was that they were dragons. In Europe there had been debate about unexplained lights from at least the medieval period. Locals later told her such phenomena were aku, devil lights. As Kingsley paddled quickly after it, it went down into the water, still glowing as it sank. ![]() One then flew off back into the trees while the other floated over the lake surface. The two lightballs circled each other until Kingsley approached them in a canoe. ![]() On a visit to Gabon in 1895, for instance, the writer Mary Kingsley saw a ball of violet light roll out of a wood onto the banks of Lake Ncovi it hovered until joined by another, similar light. (The Indians and Chinese sometimes built temples where lights appeared with some regularity.) Europeans visiting some of these lands also reported seeing strange lights – they were not just local lore. To the Irish they were fairy lights, to the Scots they were simply gealbhan (balls of fire), to Malaysians, pennangal (the spectral heads of women who had died in childbirth), to Indians they were local deities or the lanterns of spirits, to Africans they were devil lights, to Brazilians the “Mother of Gold” leading to buried treasure, to Chinese Buddhists they were Bodhisattva Lights. Historical literature has revealed that people from all cultures and times have seen unexplained light phenomena (Devereux 1982, 1989). Gaddis published Mysterious Fires and Lights (1967), which had chapters such as “Earth’s Glowing Ghosts”. Although there was no book dedicated solely to this approach within ufology at this time, American author Vincent H. In France at about the same time, Ferdinand Lagarde was also noticing a significant correlation between reported ‘UFOs’ and geological faulting. As early as the 1960s, he was associating their appearance with areas (“windows”) of geological faulting, earthquakes and geomagnetic anomaly. John Keel, a later but similarly far-sighted American writer, came to the conclusion that ‘UFOs’ were more likely to be “soft” lightforms than “hard” metallic craft. Fort acidly commented that “the conventional scientist” of his day had a “reluctance toward considering shocks of this earth and phenomena in the sky at the same time”.Įxcerpted from Paul Devereux’s The Powers of Ancient and Sacred Places, available from Amazon US or Amazon UK, or your favourite online bookseller. He found reports describing such effects as “a great blaze” in the sky and a flying “luminous object” coincident with the quake. For example, he drew attention to the December 1896 earthquake in the Hereford – Worcester region of Britain (Fort 1923). He linked strange aerial lights with earthquakes, predating modern geological confirmation of ‘earthquake lights’ (EQLs). In assembling his compendious record of unusual events, Fort began to spy possible connections that virtually no one before him had the range of data or wit to perceive. One of the earliest modern investigators to raise awareness of such ‘earth lights’ was the American, Charles Fort. Although fairly primitive, this geographical study nevertheless clearly indicated that over the centuries modern ‘UFOs’ (as the current fashion has it) and earlier “balls of light” or “meteors” in Leicestershire shared a common distribution with faulting, seismic activity and unusual meteorology. It formed a two-part article entitled ‘Portrait of a Fault Area’ (Devereux and York 1975). It was no accident, then, that many years later a colleague and I chose to conduct an investigation of reports spanning a few centuries telling of strange phenomena, including curious lights, in our home county. A teacher who had taken a school party out on a field trip to nearby Charnwood Forest – a dramatic, fault-ridden and ancient upland landscape where later Triassic sediments sit directly on top of Precambrian rocks – stated that he and the kids saw lines of “tadpole-shaped” lights crossing the sky just before the quake struck. In that year and county there was a significant earthquake, in which I saw the school walls bulge (but fortunately not collapse). My curiosity regarding the relationship between the earth, seismic activity and strange lights was piqued in 1957, when I was a schoolboy in Leicestershire in central England.
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