Talk:Paulding Light

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I did a little research and found that the lights that most people are looking at now are not in fact the paulding lights at all. The true paulding lights don't appear in the tree tops in the path of the power lines. They appear much lower, on the dirt road and in the forest. What you are seeing up in the power lines is nothing more than cars off in the distance, and you can prove it by taking a telescope or some high powered binoculars and looking at the site durring the day.

Try looking here for more information: http://www.unexplainedresearch.com/files_anomalies/paulding_light.html Looks to me like they had the same idea as me.

I've seen the real lights briefly on my one visit to the sight and I tried to chase them down. They disapeared just like the stories say, but my family swares that they were shinning the whole time I was looking for them. I have no explaination for this but it has planted a bug in me that will keep me going back to try and figure it out.

Tec54 16:48, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I am a former resident of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I have visited the site of the Paulding Light on two occasions, in 2003 and 2004. I have read that the light is caused by reflections of headlights and taillights from a nearby highway, but I have sound reasons for not believing that is the case, at least not for the light that I have witnessed.

Often the appearance of the light would begin in the distance and be very dim, and then move towards my point of observation. However, the movement was not always steady; often the light would pause completely or move quickly and erratically in three dimensions (up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards, etc.). The light would disappear in various ways - moving back into the distance and fading gradually away, or fading quickly while being quite close. I remember the color of the light ranging from orange to red to yellow to white to blue, with smooth transitions between these colors, and the brightness of the light varying widely as well, from very dim to very bright. The light appeared to have a spherical shape.

My primary objection to the headlight reflection theory is that in order to see light reflected, there must be a surface for the light to be reflected from. While there are power lines and tree limbs in the area, I can say with a high degree of certainty that the paths I have seen the light take do not match up with any objects in the vicinity. The light simply passes through open space. Nor, on the nights I visited, were there any atmospheric factors that could contribute to reflectivity, such as fog, and even if there were, the reflected light ought to appear diffused, not focused and bright like what I observed.

Furthermore, I have approached and come fairly close to the light. On one occasion, I went beyond the guardrail and down the hill a little ways, with the light seeming to be perhaps 100 feet ahead of me and approximately 10 feet above the ground. From my perspective, the light moved around a bit, and then faded away. I walked a bit further, and then, somewhat disappointed, walked back to where the people I was with were waiting. They excitedly told me that the light had been directly above me, but I had seen nothing. While differing perspectives could, in this instance, support the reflection theory, again comes the problem - there was nothing for the light to be reflected from above where I had been standing, only open sky.

Finally, I must mention some details that further support my conviction. The light moved at highly variable speeds and in such erratic manners that I would find it very difficult to imagine a path for reflected light to take from a source moving at more or less constant speed and direction that would create such an effect. Also, the light could be so bright! It appeared to radiate light in a spherical fashion, at times illuminating the trees and ground all around it. On such occasions it resembled nothing more than the sun in miniature, only not so bright as to prevent direct, extended observation.

I would urge interested parties to go and see it for themselves. While the phenomenon is highly variable and it is said it doesn't always show up every night, the light made its first appearance on each of my visits within 15 minutes of arrival.