The Appalachian Mountains have always been a hotbed for some of America’s best-kept mysteries. Countless reports of bizarre creatures and moving lights have surfaced in the past couple hundreds of years, and they were all ignored or forgotten until new conclusive evidence emerged from the valleys of North Carolina’s Brown Mountain.
Long before white settlers laid claim to the area near the mountain, the Native Americans told stories of luminous entities that had taken up residence inside their holy mountain. When the temperatures dropped during the autumn, the entire tribe would gather on the nearby hill to watch in amazement as massive, glowing orbs of light darted out of the cliffs and hovered in the sky while performing strange dances over the treetops. The Cherokee people residing at the base of the Brown Mountain were witnessing this anomalous display since at least 1200 A.D. They thought the dancing lights were spirits of ghostly maidens who’d lost their husbands in a great battle with the Catawba tribe. After the first pioneers established in the area, they too witnessed the plasmatic lights, considering them to be the torches carried by Native Americans. By the 40s, the countless myths behind the Brown Mountain Lights had turned into campfire stories about nomad ghosts with their lanterns, however, the bizarre phenomenon remained the same. Whatever the lights were, they were as real as it could get.
After the Roswell incident back in 1947, the entire ghostly perspective changed into a fresh, and probably more realistic explanation – the peculiar Brown Mountain lights were coming from outer space. But can this hypothesis be trusted in the absence of certain proof? According to different accounts, researchers tried numerous times to debunk the ghostly or alien view of the hovering lights, but without success.
So what are these mysterious lights and where do they come from? Since many reports refer to them as appearing from the sky and also from the remote cliffs of Brown Mountain that are out of reach for humans without special equipment, the extraterrestrial explanation seems to be the most likely. Even more, in 2010 the National Geographic documentary “Paranatural” succeeded in capturing on tape some of the best footage of the phenomenon to date, further puzzling researchers as to their origins. YouTube user ElitexxRainx describes his experience with these lights, adding up even more to the extraterrestrial possibility.
Other theories range from campfires, to cars, to people throwing flashlights in the air, but most of these claims have been disproved by the many professional and amateur studies conducted in the area. Could there be a more perplexing explanation for this anomaly? Is it possible that the Brown Mountain harbors a secret alien base? Well, that would explain a good part, if not all the reports coming from the Brown Mountain in North Carolina.