Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2025
A Physicist studying the UAP mystery visits Cloverdale, Alabama
by: Brent Raynes
Rex Groves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTdW_v1wfxw
Mystery lights of Cloverdale, Alabama from video taken on the night of October 22, 2024, by Lee Freeman.
During the second week in March, Cloverdale, Alabama welcomed an unusual guest: physicist Rex Groves, a former Department of Defense researcher and lifelong astronomer. He was accompanied by his 14-year-old daughter Maddie who was using this field trip as a science project. Their mission? To apply cutting-edge science to a mystery that’s baffled locals for decades—the so-called “spooklights” that have danced across the Alabama sky in this area since the 1970s. "I worked as a physicist for the Department of Defense for some years in various capacities," Rex Groves explained to me. "I've had a lifelong interest in astronomy. I have a robotic observatory in New Mexico, so I've been primarily working with astronomy projects.”
The observatory he explained is located in the middle of a desert in New Mexico. "It's totally robotic," he said. Every three months he visits the site to monitor it and do some maintenance and cleaning. It's now set up with specialized cameras that currently are imaging satellites and aircraft to capture their spectral signatures.
The purpose?
"One day I was listening to a podcast whose guest was Ryan Graves, an F18 Navy pilot. He was discussing his experience of radar contact with many of these UAPs off the East Coast during a training exercise. After leaving the service he started Americans for Safe Aerospace, an organization that addresses the safety issues that could arise from interactions with these unknown objects."
“Later, Ryan became Chair of a UAP committee linked to the AIAA, which is the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I joined the group offering my scientific expertise and rapidly found myself leading the Hardware Factors Group. We look at possible ways to detect UAPs. If they appear, we try to forecast and develop any equipment or procedures that we can use to determine their nature"
“Lately, I’ve been developing some capabilities in hyperspectral imaging. The information about many objects in the skies is all contained in the light. Every object has a spectral fingerprint. If we can measure that fingerprint, it gives us clues to its nature."
My conversation with Rex was taking place Tuesday evening, March 11th, and this night and the night before Rex was to be found set up with his sophisticated hyperspectral camera in an attempt to capture images of anomalous lights in the skies of Cloverdale, Alabama. Wyatt Cox, the author of Spooklights: The Amazing Cloverdale Alabama Spooklight Mystery (2007), who along with his friend Greg Keeton, had been chasing and photographing this light phenomenon going all the way back to 1977, were both on hand, along with other local regulars like Lee Freeman and B.C. Clemmons, who had their camera equipment set up on tripods too, who had joined the effort in recent years, and none were disappointed on either night.
For a whole year, going back to February 2024, these anomalous lights have been showing up with an accelerated frequency not previously observed before. Wyatt and Greg will confess how they now can see a lot more lights in a single night than in a whole week of skywatching in years past.
“The U.S. government has a task force to try and understand what UAP are,” Rex added. “The Pentagon admitted that there are things in the sky that we don’t understand. Part of our task working with Ryan Graves and the AIAA is to find out for ourselves what they are. We don’t really have access to government images and data, so we’re trying to compile our own. That’s what we hope to do.”
“Primarily I’m collecting light from unknown objects. As I said before, every object has a spectral fingerprint – so if I can see that light curve, then it gives me a clue as to what it is. So tonight, we’re looking at the earthlights and they glow, correspondingly giving off light. So, hopefully we can get a clue as to whether they’re plasma balls or something else.”
Thus, Rex further explained, getting back to the robotic observatory in New Mexico, that his plan is to eventually have the site identify and thus ignore the light “fingerprints of satellites and aircraft” and concentrate on filming only anomalies that don’t fit the conventional profile.
I showed Rex a copy of Nightcrawler: Eye on the Sky, by engineers John Tedesco and his brother Gerald, and a fellow investigator named Donna Nardo. They have two equipped vans, mobile labs with radar, infrared cameras, and all sorts of other equipment essential for detection and analysis of such phenomena. I discovered that Rex had spent a couple nights skywatching with them on a beach up there on Long Island, at a site probably a mere 25 miles south of the Mount Misery area John Keel wrote so much about in his book The Mothman Prophecies, a location that I visited back in April 1972, shortly after turning 20. (On a road trip with an old high school buddy) If you haven't read Nightcrawler it's a significant and thought-provoking contribution to the field. The brothers experienced temporary paralysis with their legs in one encounter and then later possible "hitchhiker" type activity - along with other team members - where they felt followed home by these lights, one of them (Donna Nardo) seeing one in her bedroom one night! Also, the weird incident one morning on the beach of three warm bare footprints around 1:30 a.m. (no one there that they could see) suddenly appeared on the beach, oddly with six toes and no prints leading up to them, still warm (checked with FLIR Thermal Camera) and leading toward the ocean waters.
Where did they come from? How did they just appear like that?
While Rex was there with them, he skywatched on the beach two nights and saw no UAP activity, although he heard a team member’s Geiger counter sound off. The next day they reviewed what had been recorded and were surprised to find six months’ worth of safe radiation registered in less than 5 minutes. It’s not clear regarding the source and fortunately it wasn’t higher. It has been noted from other UAP encounters that radiation has been associated with some of these kinds of incidents. Data from the event was collected and is presently going through rigorous analysis. Rex expects that one or two more trips to Cloverdale may be necessary to get a handle on these mysterious lights.
“Over the past eight months or so, I have noticed that many of the earthlights or orbs appear very small and faint and appear to be very far away (although the jury is still out as to whether they’re really very far away or close up and just really tiny),” Lee Freeman wrote me on March 27th. “One night back in February I observed, by my count that night, about 30 of these really tiny ones. However, when I went home and reviewed the video on my night-vision binoculars it turned out to be one hundred plus! I couldn’t see these tiny ones at all with the naked eye, only on the LED of my binoculars. For about three months, we’ve been seeing a lot of these smaller ones, usually in addition to several dozen of the larger ones. One night there was a ‘warm up act’ of several dozen small ones, followed by a fifteen or twenty minute ‘intermission,’ and then the ‘main act’ of fifty plus of the larger, white and a few red ones, including several bright ‘flareups.’ On the camera LED the smaller ones often look like fireflies, flitting up, down, sideways, etc. My count should only be taken as an approximate number because they’re so small and moving so quickly every which way that it’s tricky getting an exact count.”
“That Monday and Tuesday night [March 10 and 11] I was trying to track the orbs in my LED, thus I noticed many of these smaller ones that you guys couldn’t see because you were scanning with the naked eye.”
Video presentation on the Cloverdale “earthlights” by Wyatt Cox back in August 2024 in Huntsville, Alabama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM0OnDLjE4s&t=11s
I (Brent Raynes) will be speaking at the Eureka Springs UFO Conference in Arkansas, April 11-13. My presentation will be on the legendary and controversial journalist, UFO author John A. Keel and those ongoing mysteries. Link: https://ozarkufoconference.com/#675fa9e4-864e-4904-a723-f6e84f7ae9dc
May 3rd I’ve been invited to speak on Mothman at the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Festival. Link: https://www.thebigfest.com
July 18-20, my wife Joan and I have been invited by doctors Greg and Lora Little to join them on an ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment) sponsored Indian Mounds Tour in Ohio. Sites visited will be Shrum Mound, Mound City, Serpent Mound, Seip Mound, Cross Mound, and the Newark earthworks. We’ll help do purification and meditation ceremonies at some sites. Link: https://edgarcayce.org/events/tours/
I hope to see some of you out there in person.
