Multicolored lights that exhibit small movements and have been sighted since 1913 near Morganton, North Carolina. They are a long-established example of the phenomenon of ghost lights. The U.S. Geological Survey determined that the lights could be from distant car or locomotive headlights and/or brushfires. Another investigation in the 1970s by the Oak Ridge Isochronous Observation Network concluded that some not all of the lights might be refractions from locations beyond Brown Mountain.
A cosmological system of thought, based on the magical and animistic ideas of 16th-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno. At a young age, Bruno entered the Dominican order in Naples. He was eventually accused of heresy and fled in 1576, traveling throughout Europe for the rest of his life.
Heavily influenced by Agrippa’s textbook of Renaissance magic, De Occulta Philosophia, Bruno’s teachings are full of magical images, incantations, and other occult procedures. Bruno envisaged a universe of infinite space and innumerable inhabited worlds, overseen not by a single god but by the “God in things,” with a “profound magic” or psychic life of nature as the principle of movement. Although “against” mathematics, Bruno defended Copernican theory against popular sentiment on animistic and magical grounds. Describing Copernicus as “only a mathematician” who had little understanding of his own scientific discoveries, Bruno saw Copernican heliocentricity as confirmation of a return to an “Egyptian” philosophy of universal animation.