We all know that virtually all orbs in photographs are nothing more than distorted dust, water, or bugs. But can there be orbs seen with the naked eye that are paranormal?

There have been a few times in my life when I have seen unexplained balls of light with my naked eye. I don’t have another word for what they might be except the dreaded orb, which is almost a swear word to most investigators in recent years. I’m right there with them. I see allegedly shocking orbs in photographs or video and I want to tear my hair out and scream. The television show, My Ghost Story, has only encouraged this misguided idea that what are really bits of dust or moisture are shocking evidence of the paranormal. Seeing balls of light behave with intelligence and without the aid of a camera are entirely different things though.

My biggest experience with balls of light happened in Gettysburg. My very first time there, I went to Little Round Top at dusk before I totally lost daylight to see my way through the woods. It was my first experience coming into contact with something tangible that played an important role in Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s life. I was there with a few other people and we were all standing around quietly talking about everything that had happened there. At one point, I looked toward the position where the 15th Alabama charged up toward the 20th Maine and I noticed a little movement. I squinted a bit and thought I saw a firefly, except it was November, and fireflies don’t progressively grow to the size of baseballs right before your eyes. More appeared, each moving toward the 20th Maine position but vanishing once reaching a certain point, as if hitting some kind of barrier. They were colored lights as well. Some were in varying shades of red, orange and yellow, while fewer were in shades of blue and green. No one else in my party seemed to notice the lights, so I didn’t say anything. I thought maybe I was just misinterpreting giant Pennsylvania bugs or somehow imagining it. After I went home, I searched online for paranormal experiences on Little Round Top and, much to my shock, other people had reported seeing the same thing at different times.

Here is a photograph of my party and I on Little Round Top that exact evening. It should be known that I was with Jeffrey Keene, who is widely known to be the reincarnation of Confederate General John B. Gordon and a lady who was once Lucy Pickens, who was First Lady of South Carolina at the start of the Civil War. I still wonder if being a Union general’s wife accompanied by Confederate notables had some effect on the spirit activity that evening.

A few years before, I had been basically bed-bound due to a multiple year battle with borderline kidney failure. It was the middle of the night and the house was quiet when I noticed movement by my bedroom door. Three or four blueish-green balls of light came into the room and they ranged in size from a marble to a baseball. I don’t recall being afraid. Quite the opposite. I felt rather calm.

I asked other people recently if they too had ever seen mystery balls of light and I received a great deal of responses. There were a lot of reports of similar things that I had seen and there were other experiences like a sparkling effect or a gassy effect as well. The majority of experiences were just like mine, however, but nobody knew what to make of them. They all saw the same things but the question of what it all meant was met with a resounding I don’t know.

So what are these balls of light? What do you think? Are they partially manifested spirits? Are they merely traces of the earth’s energy? Are they some type of inhuman entity?