The 1946 Kansas City Star and Camp Crowder Watch of the Hornet Spook Light

The light has many names. Hornet Spook Light. Tri-State Spook Light. The Devil's Promenade light. It is watched from E 50 Road, known as Spooklight Road, a few miles west of Hornet, Missouri, just across the state line near Quapaw, Oklahoma.

Witnesses describe it in vivid terms. Robert Gannon, writing in Popular Mechanics in 1965, said it sometimes "looks like a lantern far in the distance, carried by someone slowly walking." At other times it was "a ball of fire hurtling at the viewer with incredible speed." In 1934 Clara E. Gordon saw orange or greenish lights appear at intervals of four to seven minutes. One old account, recalled by F. W. "Bill" Mizer in the mid-1950s, reaches back to 1903.

In 1946 Kansas City Star reporter Charles W. Graham read a first-hand account by C. Paul Spidell of Baxter Springs, Kansas. He became curious. He wrote to Col. Dennis E. McCunniff, commander of Camp Crowder near Neosho. McCunniff first suspected hallucinations. Then his secretary, a Neosho resident, told him they had seen the lights personally. The colonel said he was curious. He would cooperate.

The work fell to Maj. Thomas E. Sheard, the post signal officer. He was testing a theory put forward in 1945 by Dr. George W. Ward, formerly of the National Bureau of Standards and the Midwest Research Institute. Ward proposed that the light was refracted car headlights far to the west.

Sheard flew west from Spooklight Road. About 10 miles away he found a road that lined right up with it. He posted a car there. The driver and the observers on Spooklight Road kept in touch by radio. After dark, the car flashed its headlights. By one later account, the light appeared and disappeared exactly as the headlights went on and off.

On 19 May 1946 the Star published the result. "Headlights, coming from a road eight or 10 miles away." Graham, Sheard and the others were "satisfied that the Spook Light was nothing more than car lights." Graham conceded the answer might not satisfy everyone who had seen it.

He was right. Later retellings credited the "Army Corps of Engineers" and said the study had called it a "mysterious light of unknown origin." Capt. Bob Loftin argued the Army had studied the wrong road and pointed to Highway 66 south of Quapaw. His 1955 booklet, Tri-State Spook Light, carried a hand-drawn map. Tourism promoters kept the mystery alive. A mid-1950s booklet advertised a $10,000 Lloyd's of London bond for anyone who could prove the light was fake.

Later tests kept pointing to headlights on Route 66. In 1955 eight young men from Kansas City saw as many as seven lights through a telescope and measured cooler air near the Spring River. Gannon's telescope split the light into paired headlights. In 2015 University of Central Oklahoma students staged a headlight reproduction. Skeptoid favours a superior mirage over the cooler river valley.

Witnesses push back. Jackay Smith remembered a vivid orange light coming toward them as a child. "It felt like heat was radiating off the sun," Smith said. "I know one thing: It was not the reflection of a car." Old-timers say they saw it before cars existed. A local resident named Walker told the BBC it is too far from the highway.

The Ghost Research Society photographed the light in the 1980s and filmed it in 1983, capturing it splitting and drifting side to side. KGOU counts dozens of amateur attempts on YouTube. The 1946 watch, a reporter and an Army signal officer with a car and a radio, remains at the centre of the argument.