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Lights in the Field

On 4 January 1969 Dr White and his wife were driving across the Isle of Wight towards the village of Niton at the extreme southern tip of the island. It was the night of a bright full moon although there were several heavy dark cloud masses in the sky. In a remote part of the island’s centre, they were driving past fields in an area where the nearest farmhouse was some miles away. They realised that the fields ahead of them were covered with ‘bobbing lights’, what appeared to be torches held by many people moving around in the fields. As they got to the top of the hill they were climbing they could see that all the fields to their right were covered in these lights, looking almost like ‘a great city’.

At first they believed, reasonably enough, that they had probably seen shepherds in the fields. Then they decided that, in view of the great number of lights, they must be looking at some sort of agricultural exhibition, though they did think that a night in January was a rather odd time for one. The mystery thickened as they approached what they thought was a cart track to a farm but which now appeared to be a very well-lit city street with buildings on either side.

Yet when they actually reached the beginning of the farm track they discovered that it was exactly what they had expected it to be, a moonlit track with no buildings at all. They were beginning to be somewhat unnerved. At a crossroads south of Newport almost exactly at the very centre of the island, is the Hare and Hounds Inn, a familiar landmark on their journey. As they approached the inn they could see it was bathed in light. Figures carrying torches were running across the road ahead of the car. The fields beside them were also covered in lights. Ahead of them a very tall man ran in front of the car; they noticed he was wearing a leather jerkin and a broad belt. Dr White decided to stop and ask what was going on in order to relieve the tension.

A mere twenty yards from the inn, the lights and the figures disappeared, leaving the pub in darkness with just the usual lights shining from its windows. Now quite unnerved, the couple decided not to stop and drove on to Niton. After their evening out they returned along the same route in the early hours of the morning but were not subjected to any further experiences. The case is interesting for many reasons. Firstly, it appears that if some kind of apparition or time sup was taking place then the Whites were going in and out of it periodically rather than experiencing a single vision which then cleared.

One suggestion that was made that they might have been seeing a mirage of, say, Portsmouth ‘bounced’ off the clouds seems unlikely given the close proximity of some of what they saw. Mrs White herself suggested that perhaps they had seen a time slip of events at a different time in the same area. The principal suggestions are that they witnessed a Roman camp, or some sort of Viking encampment; the tall man seen outside the Hare and Hounds seemed more Viking than Roman in appearance.

The vision would seem to relate to the past rather than the future, since the lights seemed to be hand-held rather than fixed urban lights. The future would presumably be more likely to feature fixed lights in a built-up area unless we speculate about some sort of post-nuclear-holocaust world. Only the description of green, red and orange lights in the ‘city street’, where the farm track was, suggests something more modern, but a vision of the past is certainly not ruled Out as an explanation for this extraordi nary experience. Essex | France | Wiltshire | Wiltshire | Cornwall | Devon | Devon | Devon | Essex | France | France | Hampshire | Indonesia | Ireland | Italy | Kent | Lancashire | London | London | London | London | Norfolk | North Yorkshire | Norway | Norway | Oxford | Oxford | Phenomena | Salop | Suffolk | Surrey | Surrey | Surrey | Unknown | Warwickshire | Wiltshire |