2010-09-03 - Nashville, IN - Light

My wife and I regularly hike in the Brown County State Park in the evenings. On our drive home at about 8:55 p.m, we passed a cleared lookout spot on top of one of the park’s hills and saw several very bright, yellow-orange lights, stationary in the sky, northeast of our location. We parked and got out of the car immediately, and then stood in the dark watching these lights for the next four minutes approximately.

The park has many of these scenic overlooks where trees have been removed and people can pull their cars off the roads and view forested hills, perhaps as far away as 15-25 miles. Brown County is very rural and covered with forested hills. There is no town, or towers, or any high structures in the direction of these lights. However, Camp Atterbury, a military camp, is about 10 miles east of this location.

For the next four minutes or so, we watched these lights come on, stay lit about 30 seconds or so, and then go off, fading quickly. We noticed as one light would go out, another would often come on in another location. Often, the lights seemed to be grouped in a diamond-shape pattern, but this shape changed as a light would go off. We saw as many as 5 lights at one time, and as few as one, before all of them went completely out. They appeared, at first, to be stationary, but through careful observation we noticed that lights would go slightly out of alignment with each other, suggesting very slow movement. We wondered if these lights were attached to a larger shape or form that we could not make it out. They were bright and it was getting dark. It is also hard to say how far away they were from us with any accuracy. They may have been a mile or so away. Even if they were as close as a mile away, the lights themselves would be rather large and exceedingly bright. If they were! attached to a form, it would be gigantic. They may have been have been several hundred feet in the air and were above tree line. Becasue we do not know how far away they were, it is also hard to determine how high they may have been.

My wife had her iPhone and located the direction of the lights (northeast from where we stood) and zoomed in to take a picture at a time when three lights were present.

My son (age 24) and I watched similar very bright, yellow-orange lights one night, in the same direction, about 2 ½ months ago. They also went off and on as well; there were about 10 lights or so. At that time, we heard what sounded like thunder rumbling coming from these lights. When I asked him what they looked like to him, he replied, "They look like the lights on the front of a stereo equilizer, moving slightly in relationship to each other."