Yakima

Yakima and the Lights over the Fire Towers

From 1964 into the 1980s the fire lookouts of the Yakama reservation in southern Washington kept a log of night lights over the Toppenish Ridge: orange spheres that rose from the crest, hung, and went away. The records were kept by people whose job is to watch the same ground all night and tell a campfire from lightning. The material reached the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, and Yakima became one of the few cases with a long, disciplined run of observations by the same observers. The leading hypothesis is earthquake lights: the area is heavily faulted, and glows over moving faults are described elsewhere in the world too. It could not be proved on this material.