2004-12-12 - Nashville, TN - Light

lights circling inside clouds over Nashville

My wife and I were driving on I-40 westbound on Sunday night, coming back to Nashville from east Tennessee. After passing the Lebanon exit, I began noticing lights moving inside the clouds closer to Nashville. As we got closer, I could tell that they looked like spot lights shining down from above or inside the clouds instead of from below, and they were moving in large circles. This night we saw two of them moving in large circles and figure eights from east to west over Nashville. One of the main reasons I became so interested was that my wife and I have seen similar lights before.

I filed a report back in 8/03 about lights we saw clrcling around inside the clouds during a big thunderstorm. We had pretty much conviced ourselves that this earlier sighting was a spotlight promoting something, or maybe lights from the Starwood Ampitheater, which we're kind of near (although I don't know why anyone would have continued to shine these types of lights during one of the biggest thunderstorms of the summer). These lights looked almost exactly the same and were moving in almost the same fashion, except there were only two instead of four. So now we had a chance to try to find the source of these lights and prove to ourselves that we weren't seeing anything out of the ordinary.

We closed in on the city from about 30 miles out and the lights became increasingly obvious. I'm sure other cars must have seen them, but there's no way to know. I had slowed down a lot because I was fascinated by these lights clrcling and seemingly swooping around just above the cloud ceiling. We kept expecting one to become more visible or distinct though a break in the clouds, but it never happened. They stayed very fuzzy and shapeless. The lights would circle opposite each other, then move together and back apart or do some crazy zig zag. However, we never saw a beam of light from the ground, and that was primarily what we were looking for.

We got off the interstate on Stewarts Ferry Pk., when we thought we were finally getting below the lights, and went east. I was driving, but my wife could still see them northeast of us, so I took a left on Lebanon Pk and went north. Now we were very close to the Nashville airport, but the general movement of the lights seemed to be to the northwest and we could never get under them. We were also getting around more city lights and it was harder to see them, and they seemed to be farther away from us. We were tired from our drive so we went on home, but we satisfied ourselves that these lights were not originating from spotlights on the ground. I don't know that it proves anything about the first lights we saw, but it makes me wonder. I know other people must have seen these lights, as they were all over above the city, so I'm hoping someone else will come forward.