I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives for, well, you know.

And if we've learned anything, it's that certain strange things really do seem to come up

again and again. There are so many cryptids, UFOs, mysterious noises, the fun stuff. But there are also

shining beacons. That's right. In every region of this patchwork

nation, there seem to be reports of mysterious lights. In fact, try this experiment. Give the phrase

mysterious light a search and skim the results. You'll find that

the headlines abound. Like this past May, sky gazers in Utah, in California, in Arizona, in Nevada,

all reported mysterious white strands of lights floating around in the evening sky.

And sure, maybe all of those were actually SpaceX satellites, but those breathless accounts speak to a bigger part of our psyches.

When something unknown flickers across the sky, we can't look away.

Let's go back a little further.

Now, we don't usually care for Wikipedia, but it happens to demonstrate this point for us

just beautifully.

Say you start with a page for,

Oh, the Paulding Light,

which has shimmered in a valley not far from Paulding, Michigan,

since at least the 1960s.

If you scroll down the page just a little further, you'll realize you've just scratched

the surface, because in the sea also section, you'll be led into a shining maze of famous,

or perhaps infamous, and unexplained lights. There's the Gerdin light in Arkansas, said to be the ghostly lantern still waved by a turn-of-the-century

railroad worker who met a tragic end. There's the brown mountain lights in North Carolina,

the light of Saratoga in Texas, the St. Louis light. Though thousands of miles

...