The Yakima Reservation Lights: The Toppenish Nocturnal Light Study

The Yakima Indian Reservation lies in south-central Washington, spelled "Yakama" since 1994. Mount Adams dominates the skyline. Two thirds of the land is closed to the public. Tribal fire lookouts sit on the ridges at Satus, Signal Peak and Sopelia, and for years their crews reported lights.

Mostly nocturnal lights. Bright, larger than a point source, most often yellow-orange, frequently seen on or near the ground. Tribal police, deputies and residents reported them too. In Toppenish, local investigator Bill Vogel took down the reports. By 1972, engineer David W. Akers wrote, the activity had gone on for "more than eight years," with a detectable increase in the last three.

In April 1972, J. Allen Hynek surveyed the area. From 20 to 31 August 1972, Akers ran an instrumented field study. He brought a camera with a 500 mm lens, a spectrograph camera, an infrared rangefinder and a compass spin detector. Radio traffic about the lights went out in code. Earlier reports suggested the lights had responded to messages about them.

They came. On 20 August, a round reddish-orange light was joined by a second. "Movement of the objects was erratic and discontinuous," Akers wrote.

On 24 August, from Satus lookout, he and the fire lookout watched a white light that "would appear stationary for a moment, then, almost instantaneously, appear some distance away." On 31 August came a "sharply defined, brownish-orange disc." The ground near it was lit by its glow. A second observer confirmed it.

The next year brought fourteen more reports. On 13 March, a trained observer driving near White Swan saw an object "almost identical to an old dinner bell with the handle on the top." Metallic grey. Its mouth gave off "a strange, florescent orange glow." It hovered over Satus Fire Lookout, moved north in jerks, then left at very high speed.

On 27 July, a Deputy Marshal at Zillah Cemetery watched two orange balls with "sharp, well defined outlines." He turned his engine off. He "had heard absolutely no noise." He had the impression that some mass was between the two lights. A month earlier, on 22 June, the Satus lookout had photographed a bright red object moving quite rapidly between clouds.

Akers found nothing to "suggest conclusively that the source of the activity is extra terrestrial," but wrote that "something very unusual is taking place." He saw activity in waves, peaking between 1800 and 0100, and "an evasiveness which exceeds normal expectations of chance." He tested vehicle lights. On one July night, dispatchers told callers that Yakima Firing Center had two helicopters on maneuvers. The witnesses said they heard no sound.

Seismologist John Derr and neuroscientist Michael Persinger took a different view. In papers in 1984 and 1986 they linked the lights to very small earthquakes, lights that "appear to be electrical in nature." Greg Long gathered almost 200 reports over 20 years and noted that earthquake faults mark the ridge lines. Yet he argued the theory could not explain structured objects that appear to act intelligently.

Long's book, Examining the Earthlight Theory: The Yakima UFO Microcosm, was published in 1990 by the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. The reservation now stands beside earthlight sites like Hessdalen and Marfa. The lookouts kept watching. In 1978, veteran lookout Louise Kutz saw a bright orange light toward Goat Rocks, with smaller lights of every shade of the rainbow that swelled and surged like a fountain. Her words afterwards: "Louise, you didn't see what you saw, you just think you saw what you saw."