The Mysterious Paulding Light

This past week I spent the week visiting my hometown of Caspian, Michigan for the first time in over 5 years. I will be uploading posts from the week as I get them completed. We had slow internet at my house and I am working on a project for my doctorate and had limited time to write. I hope to get several posts up reflecting on our trips this summer.

One of the attractions that everyone should see when they are in the western part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is seeing the mysterious Paulding Lights.  This is a natural or unnatural phenomenon, depending on who you believe. The lights were first reported by teenagers to the police in 1966, and ever since, it has been a tourist attraction. The lights were featured on a SyFy channel program. They are similar to the Marfa lights in west Texas.

Paulding is a tiny, unincorporated village located about a 40-minute drive north west of my hometown of Caspian in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Mysterious lights, hovering and bouncing in the distance horizon above the trees could be seen at the end of a side road off Highway M-45. We have been there several times, both in summer and winter and there are always a few people there. Paulding is not exactly easy to get to, but tourists and locals from northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. On this trip, some guys in a truck were getting stoned and another family was recording the lights with their phones.

This time my brother and I took the kids for the first time, so we played up the unnatural phenomenon theory. A train employee was run over while working on the lines and ever since then, his ghost swings his lantern to warn others. Others speculate UFOs or I heard some other stories. We had the kids good and scared when we approached the dead end, marked by a roadside metal fence. There is an ATV trail that leads towards the lights, so we hopped the barrier and walked to the lights. About 200 yards from the barrier, there is a small bridge above a beaver dam and after about 30 minutes, we turned around. We saw the lights, but couldn’t work out with the naked eye, what exactly was causing them.

Michigan Technological University researchers discovered that the lights are car headlights and tail lights from passing cars on M-45. An atmospheric inversion has a magnifying effect and allows people to see eerie lights hovering above trees in the distance. I am not sure how that works.

It was a classic UP adventure and the kids loved getting scared and walking through the refreshing pine forests at night.

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