Two orange orbs, just about 10 feet (3 meters) off the ground, floated past Steve Woody and his father as they hunted deer more than 50 years ago. The mysterious lights passed them, then dropped down the side of a gorge in the Blue Ridge foothills. For at least a century, the Brown Mountain Lights have confounded residents and tourists in a rugged patch of Burke County, bobbing and weaving near a modest peak. Are they reflections from automobile headlights? Brush fires? A paranormal phenomenon, or something natural not yet explained by science? “I didn't feel anything spooky or look around for Martians or anything like that,” Woody said. “It was just a unique situation. It's just as vivid now as when I was 12 years old.” Whatever the explanation, tourism officials are hoping all those decades of unanswered questions add up to a boost in visitors making their way to scenic outlooks around Linville Gorge with the goal of spotting something mysterious. Unexplained mysteries like the Brown Mountain Lights have been the subject of cable TV documentaries and have fueled vast online communities of amateur investigators. Ed Phillips, Burke County's tourism director, is hoping to capitalize on that. Earlier this month, a sellout crowd of 120 paid $20 a head to attend a symposium on the lights at Morganton City Hall, and there was a crowd outside the door hoping to get in at the last minute. “It's a good problem to have,” Phillips said. “I could have sold 500 tickets.” Interest in the lights has waxed and waned since the first known printed reference to the phenomenon appeared in The Charlotte Observer in 1913. John Harden, a Raleigh-based radio personality, devoted an episode of his 1940s series “Tales of Tar Heelia” to the lights, saying they “not only have attracted the attention of the people of this state, but have aroused the curiosity of a nation as well.” There was also a folk song, recorded by The Kingston Trio and others that posited the lights came from a slave wandering the hills with a lantern in search of his master.
