The Moon photographed Friday, Jan. 25, 2002, by T. Rob Brown
By T. Rob Brown
Located in the vicinity of Gum and State Line roads, just on the border between Oklahoma and Missouri and not too far from the Kansas border, people from all over the U.S.A. and other places have come to see a strange, unexplained light which has been reported since the 1880s.
Most photographs of the light (by others) show it blurry and moving around. Upon observation Friday, Jan. 25, 2002, 8:30-10:00 p.m., (under the moonlight as pictured above) I saw the strange lights for the first time. At first it appeared as a beacon in the far distance on the lonely country road. Many nights, a crowd of vehicles, college students, and those partaking in alcoholic beverages can be seen scouting from their vehicles for the mystic lights.
What I saw Friday night neither scared me nor did it cause me to believe in ghosts, goblins, ghouls, or the like. There are many theories as to what the Spooklight is. There have been many reports of spooklights around the U.S.A., Sweden and I believe other countries. Some believe these lights are ghosts, UFOs, alien lifeforms, car lights (even though there were no cars in the 1880s), lights created by tectonic plate stress or earthquake fault lines, and many more strange things. I will leave any speculations up to you, the reader.
To me, the strangest things about the lights are how they appear, disappear, and reappear in a slightly-offset location. They also change colors from yellow, green, red, orange, white, and rarely a bit bluish. Keep in mind, this series of photos of the Spooklight were taken each within seconds of each other and I will show them in the order they were taken. For you technical people, these images were shot with a Nikon D1-H digital camera attached to a Nikon 400mm AF-I, F 2.8, professional lens with a Nikon AF-S 1.4X teleconverter and stabilized with a monopod and shot at 6400 ISO at 1/60 of a second with the lens wide open (F 2.8, but effectively F4 because of the teleconverter). The following images are raw -- no color correction, no resizing or distortion, no dodging, and no burning. The only thing I did was crop out approximately 50 percent of the dead space by cropping in closer on the lights. I have not included every photo, but have included them in the order I shot them.
Keep your eyes open to this page for additions in the future. My friend and accomplished journalist, novelist, cinema director, etc., Max McCoy took the trip Friday to discover what we could about this light that intrigues many people, including ourselves. McCoy recorded the lights activities with a professional video camera on high-definition detailed digital recording. I also shot some images on film as a backup to prove what I captured on digital can be seen with the use of film.
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Note the rear of a car in the foreground and the strange lights in the background.
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Picture No. 46
Note the small reddish lights to the right.
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Picture No. 60
Note the same lights in the top of the photo, the car headlights heading toward me on the country road to the bottom left
and a strange pair of blue lights to the right of the image. The small pair of blue lights were only visible in this single photo.
Picture No. 64
All photos copyright T. Rob Brown, 2002.
Use without permission is a violation of U.S. copyright laws.
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