The Mills Experiments

Today I contacted Dr. Allan Mills of the University of Leicester's Geology Department, who has written two of the very few papers that exist about Will-o'-the-wisps. He proved to be a most jovial and helpful man, and it was an absolute pleasure to speak to him; I came away from the experience rather wanting to invest more time in researching the whole phenomenon, which I have been doing.

Dr. Mills had written a paper in 1980 in Chemistry in Britain that described his experiments with trying to get phosphene to ignite marsh gas. As David Clarke said, in his Peakland Spooklights article:

Using laboratory conditions he consistently failed to reproduce a will o'the wisp type flame using methane, phosphene and other substances suspected as contributors to the chemical soup in marshland. What is more, he could not find any other natural spark which could ignite gasses produced from rotting vegetable matter. Whatever the will o'the wisp was, he concluded, it was not a product of marsh and their gas.

What was not mentioned by Clarke, and what has not been mentioned by any of the other authors who cite Mills's work (including Devereux, Corliss as far as I know, and Beavon) is that Dr. Mills published a subsequent paper in 2000 in the journal Weather which outlines a new theory that, for safety reasons, Dr. Mills is unable to test.

In any case, we spoke about the history of the lights and various other leads that I'm slowly chasing up and will be trying as much as possible to document on my ignis fatuus page.

The main problem is that there is now an impasse. Dr. Mills is unable to proceed with experiments to test his theory because the gases involved are highly toxic; and field reports of Will-o'-the-wisps were even said to have been dwindling by 1855 because of drainage. Couple that with encroaching urbanisation and you have a considerable lack of sightings.

Having said that, Wikipedia mentions some research by Garlaschelli and Boschetti wherein the traditional mechanism of phosphene was said to be proven, which is worth pursuing. I've also found some details about a phenomenon where leaking gas was said to occur naturally from the ground and be ignitable, manually. This proves at least that the gases are present in such a form as to be flammable and sustain themselves.

I'd also like to compile a database of the sightings that have been reported, and the locations at which they occur. Perhaps there are a handful of isolated sites at which field research could still occur. It would also be worthwhile, then, investigating the folklore as to the effect of the weather of the appearance of the lights, so as to pick a peak time to go looking for them. And there's also the possibility of an international venture along these lines.

It was especially nice to have talked to someone who is not only an expert of many years in the subject, but someone who was very open about his research. It doesn't happen in this field often in my experience, mainly because it is by its nature a very slow moving and tedious underfunded beast. But I think a little attitude might go a long way towards changing that.

(This post was reprinted from a post to my mysterylights mailing list).