Even after his research about drones, sky lanterns, and other aerial objects, he still could not find one that matched the description of the orb, which, according to Rich, was flying against the wind. He said it did not resemble a blimp, helicopter, or a plane. Rich described the light as something he has not seen before. A second light joined the first light briefly before they all disappeared, Rich stated. Rich said the light flew silently from Bloomfield in the northeast direction. However, on one Saturday night, he and his wife saw an orb-like light flying overhead while they put their daughter in her car seat. Rich, who resides in the township with his wife and children, says he doesn’t always sit on his lawn with binoculars in hand. Rich T., who lives in the Essex County suburb of approximately 35,000 people, says he’s not the type of person who is on the hunt for UFOs in a regular basis. All attempts to shed light on such a multifarious and mercurial phenomenon remain, as yet, satisfyingly unsatisfying.Belleville can now be added to the list of towns in New Jersey that might just get visited by space aliens. Scientists continue to offer explanations of swamp gas, fireflies, headlights, self-igniting plasma balls and even owls with a fondness for ingesting bioluminescent fungi.
The “Min Min Lights” are most often encountered on the 225-mile road between Winton and Boulia, where drivers often mistake them for approaching headlights until they pass and either vanish or bounce across the road. They can appear out of nowhere, split in two and allegedly interact “intelligently” with observers. Located in Western Queensland, the lights are described as airborne fiery orbs with a tendency to follow rather than to lead. Drawing on Aboriginal folklore, country star Slim Dusty’s 1968 Min Min Light is the ballad of a boy who follows a light “far into the night”, never to return. In a recent episode of the Monster Talk podcast, researcher Jerry Drake and his wife describe a close-up encounter with a floating ball of light at a roadside in Iceland.Īustralia’s most celebrated will-o’-the-wisp has its own visitors’ centre, “Encounter Show” and song. In a valley in central Norway, the Hessdalen Lights – multicoloured clusters of glowing orbs that dart across the landscape – have been witnessed for decades. North Carolina’s Brown Mountains remain a hotspot for lights that hover, move erratically and change colour. Urbanisation and light pollution may explain a lack of evidence for will-o’-the-wisps in countries like the UK, yet sightings persist across remoter parts of the world. In South America they are simply luz mala: “evil light”. To Indigenous Australians they are “corpse campfires” for Mexicans the spritely bruja is believed to be the soul of a witch. While the name will-o’-the-wisp is now widely used for any non-celestial spectral lights – regardless of topography – across the globe myths surrounding them are surprisingly consistent. These ghostly flickering lights emanating from marshland were said to lead nocturnal travellers into “dark waters” and even portend death. Steeped in English folklore, will-o’-the-wisps have long been perceived as bad omens. Doubtless lost to its young viewers at the time – this journalist included – was the inspiration behind the programme’s title.
O ne of the stranger children’s programmes from the 1980s was Willo the Wisp, featuring an evil TV set, a Cockney caterpillar, a lumpy dog-thing called the Moog and a benign, diaphanous narrator, Willo.