Locals Investigating ‘Blinding’ Beams of Light From Nearby Mountains Make Shocking Nighttime Discovery

Two locals from a small town of less than 1,500 people in California found themselves in the middle of something unexpected when they decided to investigate two “incredibly bright” beams of light shining across the desert from high in the nearby mountains.

The two men from Lone Pine told the San Francisco Chronicle that they spotted the beams on the night of October 10. One of the men, Cayden Thompson, said that he and a friend went to investigate in case it was a car that had driven off the side of a winding road and was in trouble.

As they drew closer, though, Thompson said they realized they couldn’t be looking at headlights. “They were blinding,” he told the paper.

They were, in fact, a pair of extremely high-wattage spotlights connected to a generator that had been stationed on a dirt pullout along the road and pointed down at the desert thousands of feet below, per the paper. A technician stopped the men, according to Thompson, and told them not to get any closer.

“They put out so much energy that you can’t stand in front of them or you’d get burned,” Thompson told the Chronicle. “It was pretty unbelievable.”

The whole thing was part of an experiment between a Los Angeles-based tech startup, Reflect Orbital, and China Lake Mountain Rescue Group (CLMRG), a nonprofit search-and-rescue volunteer organization, according to the paper.

Reflect Orbital is working toward an ambitious goal of sending 50,000 reflector satellites into orbit over the next decade that will have the ability to beam down “sunlight on demand,” according to the company’s website. The Chronicle explained that they partnered with CLMRG to see if this kind of high-intensity light could aid in nighttime operations.

“We expect our first customers to be search-and-rescue teams, so this was [a] hands-on test in a real search-and-rescue setting, coordinated with the people who would use our service,” a company spokesperson said in an email to the paper. “We’re excited to show how our technology can help save lives in critical situations.”

The volunteers were impressed, per the paper, describing the illumination as brighter than a full moon. CLMRG reportedly conducted their typical search-and-rescue exercises — like grid-pattern ground searches and carrying a stretcher — first with headlamps in the dark and then under Reflect Orbital’s mountainside illumination.

“There was definitely an awe factor,” Phillip Cash, CLMRG’s operation leader, told the Chronicle. “There’s no light, and then suddenly you can see 3 miles around you in every direction.”

He told the paper that while search-and-rescue teams are “pretty good at working at night already,” in the aftermath of major disasters, “this could be a game-changer.”