From sean@... Tue Apr 04 10:45:50 2006 Return-Path: X-Sender: sean@... X-Apparently-To: mysterylights@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 89825 invoked from network); 4 Apr 2006 16:41:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.166) by m35.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 4 Apr 2006 16:41:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO n26.bullet.scd.yahoo.com) (66.94.237.55) by mta5.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 4 Apr 2006 16:41:20 -0000 Comment: DomainKeys? See http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys Received: from [66.218.69.4] by n26.bullet.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 04 Apr 2006 16:35:38 -0000 Received: from [66.218.66.89] by t4.bullet.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 04 Apr 2006 16:35:37 -0000 Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2006 16:35:37 -0000 To: mysterylights@yahoogroups.com Message-ID: In-Reply-To: User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster X-Yahoo-Newman-Property: groups-compose X-Originating-IP: 66.94.237.55 X-eGroups-Msg-Info: 1:12:0:0 X-Yahoo-Post-IP: 80.3.64.9 From: "sean_b_palmer" Subject: Re: exactly what can and cannot an earthlight do X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=47088072; y=QgpH8PE8Ei6XM6_heqFP71JCQ6gjLVSoTgLmmpvjhHuPkS0mZe0c7w X-Yahoo-Profile: sean_b_palmer On Thu Apr 14, 2005 8:38 am, Mike Williams wrote: > What does the "earthlight" have to do or display to separate itself > from being just a ufo. Because at the moment it sems an "earthlight" > can do/be anything the researcher wants it to be. The main distinguishing characteristic is the tight coupling to the earth. Many of the reports that Devereux originally reproduced were of light phenomena that were observed at close range and were seen to specifically have come from the ground, or appeared in flaps where others of the lights had been seen to come from that source. The Egryn Chapel lights of 1907 are a good example of that. On the other hand, Peter Hassall was right in his follow up when he said that "Ball lightning, UFOs, earthlights, spook lights, ghost lights, etc.are all intermixed and given interchangeable labels!" For example, St. Elmo's Fire has been called the Will-o'-the-wisp on more than one occasion (see, e.g., Observations on Popular Antiquities, John Brand, 1777). And Ball Lightning is sometimes reported as having appeared when no clouds were apparent. No cloud, no lightning, if you ask me. It doesn't make taxonomic sense. And this is all a question of taxonomy. My current thought is that there are two ways that you can divide all the lights up. You can trawl colloquial anecdotes about lightforms and try to descriptively link phenomena names to characteristics. Or you can treat the characteristics independent of what the observers thought and said about it, and make your own categories based on statistical analysis. Both of these approaches are valid to some extent, but they both have pitfalls. Using the former approach, you're trusting the interpretation of the observer, which is bound to be invalid in a huge majority of cases, not least through to cultural bias ("I saw a spaceship!"). With the latter, you're trusting your statistical analysis to have included enough trustworthy data along the right axes to provide you with some good output; and then you'll probably find yourself assigning arbitrary names to arbitrary groups anyway. I've tended to concentrate on the former approach, whereas people such as William Corliss have concentrated on the latter. As I say, either approach is flawed, so it's best to do some of both--I'm currently trying to shift my focus to the latter approach and do a more neutrally characteristic based assessment of the lightforms. And the whole thing gets very complicated when you consider, for example, that what is traditionally viewed as several different phenomena such as earth lights, ball lightning, and earthquake lights may have different energy sources but the same atmospheric carrier mechanism... Cheers, -- Sean B. Palmer, UK, 2006 http://inamidst.com/sbp/