Most photographic orbs depict dust motes close
to the camera lens, as has been demonstrated
by stereoscopic photographs (one shows the
orb, the other does not). This photo still
accurately represents some of the other types
of orbs I've seen. Photo by snowflakespice;
License CC 2.0

On an early summer afternoon in 1989 I happened to be sitting in my living room in the Ozarks looking out through the front door when something unusual happened. A silver orb of light moved through the clear sky in a descending curve towards the west. This globe glinted with metallic light but didn't appear to be solid. It moved faster than any airplane or balloon could move and seemed headed for an impact with the ground a few miles away. I jumped up and ran out, expecting to see a plume of smoke and a fireball over the west ridge, but I saw nothing. Throughout the afternoon and evening I scanned the local radio stations for news of what I thought must have been a large meteor, but no one ever reported anything at least that matched what I had seen. The few people I mentioned the sighting to thought that I was making it up or hallucinating.

That one sighting set me on an interesting personal journey which eventually put me in touch with many people in that area who were seeing similar events. Many sightings involved globes of light which moved in unusual ways, and most people thought of these objects or orbs as UFO's.

I didn't see just the one. Over the next few years I witnessed at least a dozen, and if I took the time to sort through my memories properly I'm sure I could come up with more. In the local newspaper occasional accounts of globes witnessed by dozens of local people surfaced. One large red globe was seen floating just over the treetops in a remote area, shortly before dawn, and appeared to move into the ground.

Brown Mountain, one of my favorite places to camp.

I became accustomed to these strange events, which at least where I lived were not rare. I saw them outside, or in the house, in daytime and at night, alone or in the company of other people. The orbs seemed real enough, but behaved as physical objects should not. The orbs emerged from walls, crossed rooms and passed out through solid objects. Sometimes the orbs stopped in midair and simply vanished. Outside I sometimes saw these odd lights hovering high in the sky, then abruptly moving away at impossibly high speeds or diving into the ground in an arcing or spiraling path.

Follow up:

Most were not connected with any other unusual events and did not seem to have anything to do with aliens or ghosts. Swamp gas didn't explain them and they clearly were not misinterpretations of stellar objects or airplane lights. This was something else.

Since moving away from that area I've seen very few of these unusual lights, although I have spotted a few odd objects which probably were falling debris, and I do have other types of strange experiences on occasion. In generally things are much quieter where I live now, which points to something unusual about the place where I used to live, not to something unusual about me. I'm a little disappointed, actually, that I may have been seeing earthquake lights.

This was one of the possible explanations I came across in the beginning when I started research on this topic, but I discarded it because I had lived in that area for decades and knew it was not an earthquake zone. I was wrong. Several small earthquakes were recorded in the region in the 80's and 90's, all below 4.0 on the Richter Scale and causing little damage. Apparently several old fault lines do exist there, and I lived nearly on top of one of them. In fact, that first silvery orb I saw impacted with the ground exactly along the nearest fault. While this doesn't prove it was not an interdimensional spaceship entering an underground base before rendering itself and its occupants material again, the earthquake light theory seems much more practical now.

A brilliant orb over Haiti before the quake:

In laboratory experiments, when igneous rocks are placed under intense pressure and approach the shear point -- just before the rock shatters -- visible orbs of plasma exit the rock and act exactly like the orbs I saw, except on a much smaller scale. Orbs of light are known precursors to major earthquakes, and the intense pressures involved in seismic events also create intense patterns of lightning, erupting from the ground rather than from clouds.

Energy also emerges from the faults as invisible beams of low frequency radio waves. One explanation for the earthlight phenomenon is that ionization of air molecules occurs when two of these radiant beams cross. As stresses within the rock layers changes, the direction of these beams changes and that crossover point shifts -- sometimes gradually and sometimes at high speed. While there's no proof that this caused the orbs I saw, the theory fits what I saw better than anything else I've come across.

Not everything I experienced gets explained away by earthquake light phenomena. Many other people living in that region reported odd events which involved "implanted objects" and "missing time" as well as encounters with spiritual or ethereal beings, hauntings and alien visitations. That part of the country was very busy in that sense for at least twenty years and the events do continue. I was very surprised and actually relieved when most of that subsided in my own life after I moved. Very little of it followed me here.

Inverted rainbow clouds over China moments before earthquake.

The psychic or spiritual potential of earthquake energy is equally interesting to me, since several of my encounters did involve important personal events of that kind, in which I have considerable faith. It's not unbelievable to me that the earth itself could communicate or influence living beings in times of stress. Animals obviously respond to clues most humans don't perceive, when such changes are approaching. It's possible that some people, like me, are more sensitive to these energies and more affected by them, but perceive them symbolically rather than literally. I did, for example, dream of catastrophic earthquakes in that area back when this began for me, and saw the region as it would be after the quakes. I did receive consistent warnings in dreams; the message was clear and repeated often, that I should move north, and eventually I did. I might have experienced some old system of perception, and paid attention to it. I might have reacted to something which others safely ignore. I doubt that I'll know, because the New Madrid Fault probably won't shear in my lifetime. I might have simply experienced the first signs of that event, which certainly gets closer every day. I'm definitely more comfortable six hundred miles from the fault zone.

It's interesting to look for mundane answers, and see that there's no clear division between the ordinary and the unusual. There's some reason to think that Travis Walton, the man who disappeared in the Rockies for several days after an encounter with a "ball of light" UFO, may have been zapped by ball lightning rather than alien technology. The energy globes seem drawn to people, possibly by electromagnetic forces alone and possibly for other more unusual reasons. The message they carry may be real enough, even though the source is the Earth below us, instead of the stars.

Links:

The Cabinet of Wonders: Lincolnshire Lightning

Ask a Scientist: Lightning and Earthquakes

Alternate Perceptions Magazine: Brown Mountain Lights