Lights, especially strange lights, ones that appear suddenly or in places lights have never been seen usually draw a lot of attention. My first encounter with a strange light happen at a young age on a camping trip on the Escambia river just up the river from Mystic Springs.
I was probably no more than ten years old at the time, so this would be in the early sixties. We were on the sandbar fishing when a fire ball appeared in the sky coming from the south headed north. This thing looked just like someone had taken a piece of paper and rolled it into a ball and set it on fire.
I remember that it passed directly overhead but it being night there was no way to estimate how high it actually was. This fireball didn't make any sound at all, and it's pretty quite on the river at night especially fifty five years ago when the traffic on highway 29 was a lot less. A few days later as word got around about what we had seen, someone came forward and said they had seen something very similar about that time of night when they were coming up to the river bridge between Century and Jay.
Twenty or so years later a friend and I saw something very similar going up the river near Pine Barren Creek, the friend was a military pilot and I ask him, “what is that” he said it was nothing he knew of that the military had. He then said, I was about to ask you the same thing, since you are the one with several hours of college in meteorology and astronomy, I told him it's nothing that I've ever been taught about in those classes, but I had seen something similar about twenty years earlier. Several years later a friend told me they had seen something similar in Texas about that time.
The next experience with lights that I remember happen above Flomaton along about this time or maybe a year or two before or after the light on the river. Someone traveling between Flomaton and Atmore one night happen to notice some lights to the north, apparently this person travel this way regularly and this happen to be the first time they saw the light.
For a while after this first sighting people would gather along highway 31 and watch the lights. What had most people stumped at the time is that sometimes the lights would be red, and then they would be white. I remember one man saying that one night someone shouted they are getting closer, he said that didn't excite him like it did a lot of the people out there.
He said just before that he had decided it was time to go home and just turned around and calmly walked back to his car at about forty miles per hour. The last I remember about this instance was that it was determined that a logging company had cut several acres of large trees and people were seeing the vehicle lights from traffic on Butler street for the first time.
The next strange light that was local has since become known as the Gravel Lake light, I never saw the light but the perpetrator of the incident was a good friend and I've heard about it several times, from friends familiar with it. The Gravel Lake light was a prank carried out in the lake on the west side of the Old Flomaton road using a water proof flashlight a rope and a concrete block, making it possible to raise and lower the light in the lake.
This could quite possibly be what influenced me to pull the prank I did several years later at Mystic Springs. While several of us camped at Mystic Springs quite a bit several years ago one night we decided that we would cause a little excitement. We used a rod and reel with a heavy line, we put a heavy sinker along with two or three glow sticks on the end of the line. We activated the glow sticks and cast them off the end of the boat ramp, we were camped on the opposite side of the campground so we couldn't see the water from where we were.
Every once and a while someone would ride down to the boat ramp to check the water and see a strange green glow off the end of the ramp. A half a dozen or so came down that night and all of them came over to the camp and ask us to walk over to the ramp to see if we could see the light also.
Even mother nature puts on a great light show sometimes when conditions get right. We are suppose to be having a coronal mass ejection or solar storm during the weekend of March 17/18. This storm isn't suppose to be anything like the one I believe was in the spring of 1989 but the Aurora Borealis or northern lights might be visible as far south as north Texas and Oklahoma.
The storm of 1989 was of such a magnitude that the northern lights were not only visible here but for a few hundred miles further south as well. These lights are so rare in our area that people in their sixties and seventies had never seen them before. I had a man ask me the next day if I saw the fire in the elements last night and what I thought it meant. I told him it was caused by a solar storm, but he was convinced it meant the world would come to a end within a week or so. These days a storm of such magnitude could do real damage by disrupting peoples smart phones and other devices.
Remember Sawmill Day is coming up fast, May 5th, and the Alger Sullivan Historical Society meets at 6 PM the third Tuesday of each month at the Leach House Museum at 4th Street and Jefferson Ave. Please join us.
