Hi All. I think most of you have heard of “earthquake lights.” Those who have seen them have made a statement that they were UFOs and the UFOs caused the earthquake. As to why they would want to cause an earthquake no one has ever been able to give a logical answer. At least I have never been able to find one.

It seems that there has been a group who has been looking into these “earthquake lights” and what they have found is very interesting. At least I think it is. It may in an indirect way be the cause of ear-tones.

Paul Devereux has written a very interesting article about the so-called “earthquake lights.” Here in part is what he has to say. Take Care…Don in creepy town

Charles Fort was among the first to note that strange "meteors" appeared somewhat coincidentally with earthquakes. It had to wait until the 1960s, however, for veteran ufologist, John Keel, to associate the appearance of unusual lights with areas of geological faulting and magnetic anomaly, as well as with the occurrence of earthquakes. It was the French researcher, Ferdinand Lagarde, though, who most tightly focused in on the UFO-fault connection in the '60s. In the USA, John Keel likewise promoted the real phenomenon as "soft" light phenomena associated with faulting and other geophysical factors. In 1967, American author Vincent H. Gaddis made a pioneering stab at separating out luminous phenomena in his Mysterious Fires and Lights. In 1975, Andrew York and I published research on Leicestershire, in which the occurrences of recorded strange phenomena over a number of centuries were geographically mapped. Both archival accounts of meteorological anomalies together with reported UFOs were found to have had their greatest incidence over the faulted regions of the county. Two years later, Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist and geologist at Laurentian University in Canada, together with Gyslaine Lafreniére, published a study of the United States which similarly indicated a correlation between higher levels of reported UFO activity and the locations of earthquake epicentres.

Persinger and Lafreniére saw UFOs as electromagnetic phenomena arising from the tremendous energy involved in the constant rising and falling of tectonic stress in the Earth's crust, whether or not full-blown earthquakes occurred. They visualised fields of forces operating evenly and quietly over very large geographical regions which could become focused at any given time in a few small areas of particular geological resistance or instability such as fault lines, ore bodies or mineral deposits, stubborn rock outcrops, hills, mountains, and so on. They likened this to the energies in the atmosphere being equally capable of producing a gentle breeze over a wide area or a localised ferocity like a tornado. "The existence of man upon a thin shell beneath which mammoth forces constantly operate, cannot be over-emphasized," they argued. This was the first outing of what has come to be known as the Tectonic Strain Theory, or TST.

Harley Rutledge, a physics professor at Southeast Missouri State University, organised field investigation of an outbreak of lights that began in 1973 around Piedmont. The results of this were published in "Project Identification" in 1981.

An important researcher into light phenomena is John Derr, a leading U.S. geologist. In 1986, he joined with Persinger to study an earlier outbreak of lights in the Yakima Indian Reservation, Washington State. Firewardens on the reservation saw huge orange lightballs floating above rocks, as well as smaller "ping-pong balls" of light bounding along ridges. This remarkable period of sightings also included the occurrence of unusual meteorological effects such as glowing clouds indicating a charged atmosphere, and subterranean rumblings suggesting some kind of tectonic association. The firewardens organised themselves, and photographs were taken of the lights and triangulated observations using radios were made.

Toppenish Ridge, Yakima Indian Reservation; one of the localities where many lights were seen.

Derr and Persinger showed that the Yakima lights were seen most often in the vicinity of the ridges that cut across the reservation - each riddled with faulting - and with Satus Peak, the general area of a surface rupture and one of the stronger earthquakes in the region during the 13 years covered by the study. Successive reporting of lights occurred in the seven months preceding the biggest earthquake of the studied period. Regional seismic activity also increased during the times in 1972 and 1976 when most sightings were reported.

(The irony of the Yakima case is that the reservation is adjacent to the part of the Cascades Mountains where pilot Kenneth Arnold saw the flight of nine glittering objects in 1947 that initiated the flying saucer era . In fact, Arnold landed his plane at Yakima airfield shortly after his encounter. It is also worth noting that Arnold, did not, of course, se disks at all, but what he described as tadpole-shaped objects. This also struck a bell with me because as a schollchild in Leicesterhsire in 1957, I experience the powerful earth tremor there, and I recall one of our teachers decribing how he had seen a row of high flying lights earlier that afternoon. The lights looked tadpole-shaped, he said. Later, the local papers revealed that these objects had been widely seen over surrounding counties as well.)

• Earthquake Lights