Wisconsin Lights Investigation Casts Uncertainty On Christmas Light Show Theory, As Show Organiser Doubts Display Could Reach Distances Required

Written by Christopher Sharp - 17 January 2023

Following a media whirlwind, an investigation into unexplained lights seen in Wisconsin by multiple witnesses on 1 and 2 December 2022 has tested claims that a local Christmas light show run by the Flanders family was responsible.  

And following extensive testing, including a visit to the Flanders’ property, the results show that the light show is a possible explanation, but the maths does not make sense, according to investigators. However, an atmospheric anomaly could potentially provide explanations as to how the Christmas lights travelled up to around 11 miles. 

The Flanders Family Christmas Light Show, held in Belgium, Wisconsin, took place almost seven miles away from video footage taken from a Fredonia resident, a former police officer named Ken, who filmed unknown lights from his cornfield. And another four miles beyond Ken’s location on Wallace Lake Road, another witness named Kim, a salon owner from West Bend, recorded similar lights from the roadside. 

Lead investigators, Discovery TV host Ben Hansen and researcher Brittany Barbieri, were able to coordinate experiments, and found that similar light effects could be observed 1.5, 3, 4.5 and 5.5 miles from the Flanders’ property under similar low-cloud conditions.

Hansen told Liberation Times:

“Parts of the light movement used in one of the songs in the Christmas show, the timing, and the direction to the Flanders’ home do seem to line up nicely with the December 1st event.” 

However, the lights failed to reach the distances the lights were seen to travel at in both witness videos. 

Although prosaic explanations remain likely, including the Flanders’ lights, Hansen feels there are still significant variables that remained unanswered. He commented:

“We also have witnesses that have been able to see the Flanders light show out to almost 6 miles, but we also made a very significant discovery through this testing.  

“There’s an extraordinary difference between seeing the beams of the Christmas show 6 miles in the distance where the observer can only detect that something very small and dim is occurring on the cloud base near the horizon, versus experiencing well-defined lights intensely lit and passing overhead from that distance.  

“At this point, the math simply doesn’t support that the technology in use was capable of this unless there was some sort of very uncommon weather phenomenon that night that amplified the effect.  

“We have to be open to the possibility that there was another light projection closer by and from another location.  It may not seem important to some people that we get this right if it’s just a display of spotlights, but it is important to the community and to those concerned with the safety issues involved.”

Hansen explained that if the Flanders lights were to reach the distances required, if visible, then they would form elongated spots at an estimated one-quarter of a mile wide and one-and-a-quarter-mile long.  Placed side by side like we see in Ken’s video, that translates to the five lights spanning a distance of over eight miles, which according to Hansen is very unlikely.

Above - According to Hansen, to reach the distances required, the Flanders lights (if visible) would form elongated spots at an estimated one-quarter of a mile wide and one-and-a-quarter-mile long.

Liberation Times understands that according to formulas used by the lighting industry, the luminosity produced by the Flanders’ lights would be reduced to zero from the witness locations. 

Marc Dantonio, chief photo and video analyst from the Mutual UFO Network scrutinised Hansen’s analysis and speculated that an atmospheric anomaly could provide a possible explanation: 

“He [Hansen] used a very well-known approach which was the Pythagorean theorem to calculate a slant angle and the approach was sound. He used METAR data to get cloud base at the time and was able to construct proper triangles which to do the calculations. 

“I also felt he was trying to show scientifically that since the lights flashed and moved in the exact same cadence as the lights on the Flanders’ home, it was likely an atmospheric anomaly that allowed them to be seen from such a long distance. The problem was that the brightness of the lights appeared to preclude the ability to see them 8 miles away or so.

“One other additional thought I had addressed his concern that the lights’ lumen value was too low to be seen from such a distance. While possibly true, it is possible that the light brightness was enhanced by the atmospheric anomaly. The light energy can’t be made brighter and more energetic than at the source of course but because of the beam spread coupled with the possible anomaly in the air, the reflections could have each been seen through more water vapor droplets and summed to a brightness that could be seen.

“The same brightness being reflected by more droplets in other words might be visible.  Kind of like seeing a searchlight beam in the sky but not being able to see the light source. If those 'beams' for lack of a better term were angled more directly toward the observer then it's possible they might not be visible in clear air but visible at the cloud base where they would be reflecting off of more droplets making them visible to the eye.

“It is just a theory but it could possibly explain this.”

In response to Dantonio’s atmospheric anomaly theory, Ben Hansen told Liberation Times:

 “If this involves a weather phenomenon we’re not familiar with, we’re equally excited to learn about that too.  In this case, we would also have to accept that the situation was a perfect fluke occurrence because the Christmas show has been running multiple times every night for over a month and in all kinds of weather conditions, but the lights have never been seen again from that location.”  

The searchlight/spotlight theory had been the lead candidate to explain the mystery from the start of investigations, but the Flanders’ lights had been seen as an unlikely source due to the distances involved and lack of replicability from the witness locations.

The store owner/distributor in China has claimed the beams project for 1,000 meters, which is 0.6 miles. But due to inconsistencies which were provided by different manufacturers of the lights, Hansen coordinated with the Flanders family to test the exact lights used in their show. 

Data from the test was then given by Hansen to Matt Ford, an entertainment lighting expert, who has designed lighting for major network television shows for over twenty years and is very familiar with modern-day lighting equipment and their optical performance.

Following computer analysis, Ford concluded that it was very unlikely for the Flanders to be responsible for the lights seen by witnesses and suggested that the light source originated from the sky, not the ground.

Above - the graphic shows how, if visible, the Flanders lights would form a more elongated shape as viewed by Ken’s location.

Ford told Liberation Times:

“This case has me perplexed.  What is perplexing is while the original video from December 2022 shot from 7 miles away looks like a computerized moving light, the photometric performance of that type of fixture does not support the case.  When we choose a particular kind of lighting fixture, we look at its photometric performance, namely what the light output is at a given distance, measured in Lux.  We also use a formula called the inverse square law for light.  If you have an initial distance/lux measurement, you can plug any distance into the formula, which will return the lux value for that distance. 

“I modelled in 3D the Flanders moving light fixtures and placed a camera 7 miles away as per the Fredonia video.  We estimated the distance the light would travel from the fixture to the cloud deck to be around 20,000 feet at its furthest point.  Based on measurements taken at the Flander's house with a light meter, we calculated the light intensity at that distance would be zero using the inverse square law.

“Another consideration is the light source in their moving lights.  For example, their fixture utilizes a 380-watt metal-halide lamp, which is common on stage shows.  Generally, it has a usable distance of up to a few hundred feet.  On the other hand, searchlights, or Sky Trackers, use a xenon source that is 4000 watts, whose light beam can travel thousands of feet.  These lighting fixtures do not produce the same coordinated movement as was seen in the video.

“Further, I analyzed the 7-mile video using a video waveform monitor.  Using the inverse square law, the points of light at the cloud deck should decrease in intensity the further away it is from the source.  The waveform monitor indicated that the maximum brightness of these points was observed to be the same value at its furthest and closest distance.  This would suggest that the light source is in the clouds, not from the ground.

“This is a genuine puzzle for me as well.”

The Flanders family confirmed they were testing the lights in question at the same time as sightings from Ken and Kim but remain unsure their lights could be seen from such distances. 

A spokesperson from the Flanders family clarified to Liberation Times:

“I am not confirming these are my lights but they could be. I don’t really know how these lights could go to the distances people believe they were seen from.”

Brittany Barbieri, who has also spoken to members of the Flanders family told Liberation Times:

“The Flanders family have been very supportive of our investigations, which we are very thankful for. They confirmed that the lights were tested on 1 December, but that it wasn’t until 10 December that they were fully running. 

“Since then, despite the lights fully running at the same sequencing and tilt used in that first test, the sightings caught by witness footage have not been replicated at the same distances.”

After the story broke in December 2022, speculation focussed on the possibility of the lights being Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). However, Hansen told Liberation Times that using the term UAP does not rule out prosaic explanations and is appropriate until the source has been identified. 

Hansen and Barbieri have told Liberation Times that they wish to increase the quality of investigation by crowdsourcing and getting boots on the ground as opposed to “fingers on the keyboard”, to fully investigate. 

Locally, the sightings, which are not all theorized to originate from the Flanders, have caused some concern, with officials from West Bend Municipal Airport expressing fears that lights seen in the area could prove a flight hazard. Officials from the airport claim that similar lights have been seen and filmed from the airport. 

Such lights were also seen and recorded by witnesses from Green Bay in the north to Milwaukee in the south in the weeks before Christmas. 

Since the story emerged, Hansen and Barbieri have told Liberation Times that further witnesses have come forward, claiming to have seen unexplained lights in the Wisconsin skies on 1 and 2 December 2022. 

A sighting from Howard, Wisconsin on 1 December at 7 pm by witness Andrea Lynn took place over 80 miles north of the Christmas light show. Lynn filmed four videos of multicoloured lights flashing, swooping in circles and darting across the sky. 

The night afterwards, around 46 miles away from the Flanders’ home in Greenfield, Wisconsin, teacher, Chris Nowak, described seeing lights in the sky. Nowak commented: 

“It was like a row of illumination through the clouds, and it would pulse through the sky incredibly quickly.” 

According to Hansen, witnesses familiar with the Flanders Christmas lights remain convinced they were not responsible for what they had seen. Hansen commented that several witnesses are convinced that the involved distances are too far. Furthermore, Kim, who saw lights from Wallace Lake Road remains baffled by orbs that she witnessed darting in and around her vehicle at ground level.

Kim became unsettled when the white object – which seemed to give off its own glow – swooped in front of her vehicle on multiple occasions before the lights seen in the video appeared. 

Speaking to Liberation Times following theories blaming the Flanders lights surfaced, Kim commented:

“I regularly travel Wallace Lake Rd. I have gone up and down Wallace Lake Road multiple days a week, multiple times in the day and night and I have not seen the lights in the sky again as I did that night.

“As I originally stated the first time we saw the lights is when they were coming down in front of our headlights one at a time. We were just east of the Wallace Lake Supper Club. The light went in front of our headlights four different times while driving.  

“It was so bright white at first we thought it was a white owl until it happened over and over in the same pattern. At this time we did not see any lights ahead of us in the sky. Eventually these lights started moving forward -  ahead of us and then we watched them dance around the sky for a couple of miles until I pulled over to take the video. They eventually disappeared out to the east as I recorded in my video. 

“I have lived in this area almost 20 years and I have never seen anything like this. Since that night I have driven to the Flanders Christmas light show multiple times since some people suggest that was the source.  It is a beautiful light show but that is not what we saw. I watched their light show for quite a long time.

“I sat in front of their house, I backed up about a half mile and watched it.  Then I backed up 1 mile and watched it. I then decided to go even further as I went 2 miles, 5 miles and then 10 miles. Doing this multiple times I could not replicate or even see them once I got to 5 miles. I have gone there when the cloud cover was low, when it was high and when it was a clear night. Same result - it’s not what I saw that night.”

Important Notice

The Flanders Family has been raising money for Eastern Wisconsin Ronald McDonald House Charities. The House’s purpose is to be an inclusive community where all children facing healthcare needs and their families benefit from compassionate support.

If any of our readers would like to donate, you can do so by clicking the following link: Ronald McDonald House Charities (rmhc-easternwi.org) - the Flanders Family have also provided the following link to donate: Venmo | Robert Flanders