Subject: Spirit Lights, Missouri
From: "david clarke" <david@...>
Date: 8 Apr 2006 10:39
The Two Worlds (London), December 17, 1955 p2 Calling all cars - This is a spirit light area On Missouri highway No 43, where the Missouri- Oklahoma state line road intersects, there is a red lettered placard on a large tree. It reads: SPIRIT LIGHT AREA. It is a secluded spot, where, writes a Kansas Star reporter "etheric night-time occurrences have been going on for 50 years." The "spirit light" is attracting a growing number of visitors - as many as 40 cars in a single night. It is a "lovers lane" setting, declares the reporter, "where youths bring their girl friends, and married couples with their children park to watch the phenomenon." Here is his description of the light as he saw it: "It's white, luminescent - the size of a baseball ...are the eyes playing tricks? We blink and look again. The glow is still there, and brighter. "Now it widens, takes the shape of a football, glows brighter, turns from white to yellow, dazzles the eyes and - whoof! - it's gone." An engineer, Richard Y. Jones, who has investigated the light, told the reporter: "It's car lights." But Ted Bethea, a lawyer, and Paul Kelly, accountant, said people in the area remembered seeing the light back in the early 1900s when motor cars were virtually non-existent. Fifty-five year old Lloyd Bilke declared: 'That lightwas here before the days of autombiles, and I don't know what it is, but it's not car lights." F.W. Mizer, a former member of the board of education, now a 69-year-old farmer, told the story of "the first spirit light that was ever seen around here." In 1903 a widow who lived by herself on the state line road said she had seen strange lights. Mizer, with friends, went one night to investigate. They were sitting outside the widow's house, when: "All of a sudden a great big ball of lights rose up out of the field to the southeast. We all saw it at the same time. It bobbed around for a while, then went away." Mizer went to the field - "there she rose up, right in front of us, a big ball of light, 20 ft across, and it lit up the tops of the grass around us." The light floated around for a minute or two and then disappeared. A photograph of the "spirit light" taken by the reporter, appeared in the Kansas Star.