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.

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The Molyobka Triangle

A stretch on the border of Perm Krai and Sverdlovsk Oblast that became, in the late 1980s, the first Soviet anomalous zone written up in the national press. From 1989 thousands travelled here, reporting glowing spheres, equipment failing, loss of bearings, and "luminous people". The place is linked to old Mansi sacrificial sites. A statue of an alien stands by the village now, and the flow of researchers dried up long ago.