Paulding Light

This is one of the very few famous "mystery lights" anywhere with an explanation that was not merely proposed but produced on demand in front of witnesses. It is also routinely described in ways the researchers themselves never claimed, so it is worth separating the demonstration from the hypothesis. Who did it. Not a physics club. In May 2010 Jeremy Bos, then a PhD candidate in electrical engineering at Michigan Technological University, was looking for a project for the university's student chapter of SPIE, the professional society for optics and photonics. About a dozen students joined him. The team member named in the press release is Bill Norkus; undergraduates Doug Sims and Mike Mauer also contributed, and the project advisors were Christopher Middlebrook and Michael Roggemann of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Bos had first seen the light himself in 1997. What they actually demonstrated. Three things, in ascending order of force. First, they looked. On the second trip they brought a telescope, the light appeared, and through the scope they saw headlights on a car travelling down a highway — sometimes, Carlisle reports, with the outline of the vehicle visible. This much had been claimed before: Bos says flatly, "We're not the first people who have come to this conclusion. A paranormal investigation team came here in the 1980s and showed it was headlights." He does not name that team and we could not identify it. Second, they located the source and tested the correlation. Through the telescope they picked out an Adopt-a-Highway sign — not, as is often repeated, a licence plate — and tracked the exact stretch down on Google Maps. Norkus was then sent to stand at that spot on US-45 and log every vehicle that passed, while the rest of the team stayed on Robbins Pond Road logging every appearance of the light. "Sure enough, every time the Paulding Light appeared, a car drove by the spot." Third — and this is the part that makes the case unusual — they made the light happen. A SPIE member drove his own vehicle along that stretch of US-45, and its passage matched the appearances exactly. "Bill put on his hazards, and we saw flashing yellow lights," Bos said. A phenomenon you can switch on and off from four and a half miles away with a hazard-light stalk is not much of a phenomenon. What they did not demonstrate, at least not on the record. The October 2010 release is explicit that the spectrograph work was still to come: "The students will also use a spectrograph to characterize the light from both the headlights and the Paulding Light. Based on the evidence so far, they expect them to be identical." Michigan Tech's 2017 follow-up says a spectrograph was used, but no data or paper is given. The students planned to present at an SPIE meeting; we could find no peer-reviewed publication on the Paulding Light by Bos or the chapter. This was an outreach and teaching project, announced in a university press release and later re-staged for television — sound work, but not a paper, and it should not be cited as one. The atmospheric part is a hypothesis, not a measurement. Popular accounts say the students "proved the light is a mirage caused by a temperature inversion". The original text is far more careful: heat rising off the pavement "may sometimes contribute to the light's distortion", and an inversion layer in the line of sight "may also create very stable air, which could account for the light's visibility" at that range. In 2017 Bos described the mechanism as sandwiched hot and cold air creating an "optical duct", and noted the practical consequence: "The most interesting atmospheric effects happen near sundown, and unless it's warm and sunny during the day the fall is not as interesting as late spring." The refraction explains why the headlights carry so far, not that they are headlights; the latter was settled by the telescope and the hazard lights. Even the distance is not agreed. Michigan Tech puts the source stretch of US-45 about four and a half miles from the viewing area, and repeated the figure in 2017. The Detroit Free Press, reporting the same investigation, wrote that the road is "about 8 miles away". We could not reconcile the two. The behaviour people find impossible. Movement: Bos attributes it partly to the terrain — that section of US-45 runs over a hill, so lights rise, fall and stop as vehicles crest it, and change in intensity as drivers dip and raise their beams — and partly to autokinesis, the well-documented illusion in which a fixed point of light in an otherwise featureless dark field appears to drift. That, he notes, is why midnight is scientifically the least interesting hour and psychologically the most convincing one. The spectacular multicoloured displays he does not claim to have explained: "I think that the occasional spectacular lights happen when a cop pulls someone over" is offered, in his own words, as a guess. The objections, stated fairly. Terry Nestle, watching in 2016, was unpersuaded on duration: "That's pretty long lights for a car. That's a long-lasting light. That's not a car topping a hill." Linda Schulz, owner of the Running Bear Resort, made the historical objection: "Long before roads were even involved, this light is in some of the history that is in the area. Even in the Native American history they talk about the light, and this is long before there were roads." Kingsley was told locally that the light predated the power lines. We found no documentary support for either claim, and both are hard to test — but the timing evidence runs the other way, and it is concrete: the viewing road was bypassed and the new alignment opened in 1957; the first reported sighting is 1966. That is a nine-year gap, which is a weaker version of the argument than the usual "the reports started the moment the highway opened", but it still puts the sightline first and the legend second. Why it survives. Bos has been out there fifteen times, "hours at a time, in the heat, the cold, and the rain. It's always the same. We were there Monday with a man who saw the headlights on our computer, and he refused to believe it." Adam Feltz, a psychologist at Michigan Tech, framed it as motivated reasoning: "it's hard to change a belief, especially when one is invested in that belief emotionally", and belief can supply a sense of being special, a way of making sense of the world, and membership of a group. Bos's own summary is shorter: "No matter what, some people will believe what they want to believe." A friend asked whether he planned to disprove Santa Claus next.