Piedmont

Piedmont and the Winter of Lights

Through the winter of 1973 this Ozarks town lived in reports of lights: a school basketball bus saw them, so did the sheriff, farmers and the pilot at the local airfield. They hung over Clearwater Lake, ran low along the roads and, by several accounts, killed the headlights of cars. Harley Rutledge, professor of physics at Southeast Missouri State, came to look into it and stayed two years: he brought spectrometers, telescopes and magnetometers and worked in the field. His report, Project Identification, appeared in 1981 and remains one of the few attempts to measure such lights with instruments rather than to interview witnesses. Rutledge reached no final conclusion.