Street Lights Go out as I walk under them

I used to have the same street light go out on me every just about every couple of nights. I would drive into my neighborhood and take the first left turn and Bam! light goes out.

Told my friend about it and he said it happens a lot to him to. So we took his camera and I walked down there to see if it were to go off as I walked under it as he filmed the whole thing. Nothing happened.

Next I took my car and drove back and forth. Nothing happened.

I don't know.

But I did noticed it happens mostly when I'm stressed out and tired.:shrug:

 

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Perhaps that light is a bit dodgy, and flickers on and off at intervals (regular or random).
Try watching it for 15 minutes or so to see what it does.


Here's an interesting conversation from another forum (of sorts) back in 1998. James might recognise this one:

Terry:
I have one of those old questions that no-doubt has been asked many times. If so, I haven't heard the answer yet. It's about street lights. Or more specifically, those occasional street lights that seem to turned themselves on or off whenever I approach. I can come up with two possible explainations: 1) Some field around the body, electric or magnetic, disturbs the unstable arc 2) Vibrations do the same I find neither explaination particularly believable. What is the mechanism?

Non-believer: (says it's a hard story to believe)

Terry:
Believe it! I can direct you to a light on University Avenue in Canberra and in St. Lucia in Brisbane which exhibit this effect. The one on Uni. Av. at ANU is switched on and off by other people, not just me. It's an effect well known to college students who are regularly walking past there at night.

I don't know if anyone else has experienced the St. Lucia light. No-one I have talked to has, basically because I don't know anyone else who walks around there at night. (And when I say I walk past at night, I'm talking somewhere between 10 pm and 4 am. No chance of it being a timing effect.) The interesting difference between the St. Lucia light and the ANU light is that the ANU light switches when you get close to it---two to five metres. The light at the top of Mitre street switches as I walk towards the intersection from the other side---about 40 metres away.

I've been thinking a little about my proposed solutions. I think the vibration one is very far fetched as I am sure that a light breeze would produce more vibration than a human footfall.

As for the location of the effect, I have realised that it isn't necessarily happening at the light itself. Whatever is causing these lights to switch on and off may be somewhere further up the power line. Tonight I intend to cross the road before I get near the intersection so that I am avoiding any switches around the area that the effect usually kicks in. Maybe that will have an effect.

----------------

Terry:
I carried out my little experiment last night. As I approached the intersection of Mitre and Carmody streets, I crossed the road. It was about 1 am. True to form, when I was a few metres away from the intersection, the street light on the top of the telegraph pole on the diagonally-opposite---which had been essentially off, glowing just enough to see if you looked right at it---turned itself fully on. This suggests that the light switching is not a localised effect. That is, it doesn't seem to be caused by walking over a particular component buried under the footpath on the down-hill side of the road. I am still no closer to finding an answer!

Dr. Ed
Hmmm... Terry, I have a mission for you, should you choose to accept it. Go back to the mysterious street light. Take a watch, a notebook and pencil, and a portable chair or milk crate (and packet of cigarettes if you so desire). Sit opposite the street light and wait. You can move around if you want to... but I want you to write down the time, for every time the light turns on or off, over the course of an hour. You could alse note next to the event whether you or anyone else had passed near the light. Use the data to calculate the mean time the light is on and off for, and the spread in the on and off times. Use it also to see if the light changes without any new influences (viz. people) on it. I suspect this may answer the mystery.

What very well might be happening is that the electrodes in the street light are old and corroded. This would cause the electron emission during operation of the lamp to be less than normal, and if low enough might cause the plasma discharge inside the lamp to extinguish spontaneously. This would then prompt the starter to kick in and try and start the light again. However, if the electrode emission is low, it may have trouble doing this, which would delay the generation of a self-sustaining plasma, and cause the light to stay off for some sustained period of time. This would also explain the faint glow, which is probably a capacitively coupled localised glow discharge around each of the two electrodes of the lamp, in between attempts by the starter to turn the bloody thing on.

I suspect it may simply be a faulty flourescent light turning on and off at random with a longish time constant. Perhaps over the duration it takes a person to walk past it, it just appears by coincidence to be affected by the actions of that person.

But, we need more data to be certain!


Terry:
Well, Eddie, you were right. There was no need to observe for an hour. Ten minutes was more than enough. During that time the street light in question flicked on and off with a period of around 50-55 seconds, spending approximately equal amounts of time on and off. The way I walk past and around the corner, the street light is visible for approximately 20-25 seconds. This means that there is about an 85% chance that the light will switch on or off every time I walk past. So much for my theory.​

 

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the only thing I would say is for my experiences it only ever happens when i'm directly under the light, I never see the light go out, i'm suddenly plunged into darkness while directly below it.

the light that went out when I walked under it last night (twice) is near where i live, i'll try an experiment tonight and end my run there and see if it happens again. I'll also try and observe it from a distance.

 

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Same here lol. Im going to start a pot cafe were people can talk their minds to other intectualls. I can here it now

im hungry
me 2
want some pretsels
no chips
Pretsels!
CHIPS!!!!
PREtsels!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

) ) (
( ( )
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ] _-_:m::m::m:-
[ ] _- _-
[ ] [ ]

 

street lights over me

This has been happening to me since I was very young and I always thought it was just bad quality lights or something. I'd never heard of this phenomenon until today. I was joking with a workmate about how often street lights blow out and he looked at me strangely, said he's heard of this and I should look into it.
It happened just this morning while riding my motorcycle to work.
The odd time the street light going out will coincide with a small flash of pain just inside my skull on the left side above my ear.
A few months ago I was out riding my motorbike very late and I was going up a main street and 4 lights went out almost in sequence. Sometimes I think I can detect a 'pop' when they go out.
I don't know if I'm going insane or what but the occurence has become more frequent over time so now I kind of expect it to happen. It does happen with other people around but not as frequently and not with the same impact. It's hard to describe but I can feel a bit of a jolt when they go out.
It's also happening with cell phones. I've gone through 4 of them in a year. They're all fine at first but then the battery begins to drain faster and faster until within 3 weeks to a month, the phone won't charge at all and the battery is shot. I've changed phones, batteries, carriers, etc and it always ends up that way.
Same with my laptop. I just go through batteries like crazy.
How can I be draining these batteries? Where is all this energy going? It's not like I feel hyper.
If anybody has any answers, I'd appreciate your response.
thx,
baz

 

Fire Starter,

great book really bad film!!

 

its all coincidental

 

If this is a real case and not made up, it's not so much that you absorb energy, you might just be a very good conductor of it. For instance I'm going to mention a lightening rod and how it conducts electricity from church steeples to the ground, it's possible you are doing something similar.

Now if this was the case the question here would be, are you better off being able to conduct electricity to earth (thereby not holding a charge which could be damaging) or attempting to unearth yourself and insulate so electricity would have to find another route to earth. (Earthing occurs by electricity trying to find the route of the least resistance, in this case you, insulating should generate greater resistance)

It's also known that if people wear certain manmade fibres they tend to generate a static charge, this charge could build up to lessen resistance so you might want to try to stay clear of manmade fibres like Polyester and Nylon.

I can't give you a guarantee that any of what I have mentioned will work, however you won't know unless you try.

 

Normally i wouldn't think anything of it, but beleive me or not, but it happened to me three times in one night... I would imagine that the statistics are astronomical.

 

You'd have a hell of an imagination, then.
Why do you imagine the odds would be so extraordinarily high?

 

I've been experiencing this phenomenon since 1983. I am a totally science-oriented person and absolute skeptic. I believe in nothing (though I'm reasonably sure that when we die, we simply stop living), no superstition, no religion (which I regard as superstition), etc. I've been a devotee of James ("the Amazing") Randi for decades, and have personally busted astrologers (I'm a former radio talk-show host), by demonstrating the, "you only notice the 'hits,' and ignore the misses," effect. The closest thing I have to a belief system is my assumption that everything that happens has some logical reason.

I've watched street lights go off as I approach them for years, and have made it a point to watch street lights as far as I can see, to see if distant lights blink off before I'm near them, and it's precisely because I NEVER see them go off on the next block (for example) that I've been forced to wonder what the f*** is going on.

I've read some attempts at scientific explanations (like some people having stronger EMF than others, or that it's caused by a person's body weight pressing on a faulty underground cable), and they fall very short of being convincing. For one thing, I first noticed the phenomenon while driving, and the lights usually went out just as I approached the area they lit (not when I was directly under them). I can't believe that any person's body could generate a strong enough EMF to not only affect a streetlight, but to do it from inside a car.

I look to science to explain anything I don't understand, but sometimes the existing science isn't adequate. Thomas Jefferson was unable to accept the existence of meteors, and once wrote, "I would rather believe that two yankee [Harvard] professors would lie to me, than to believe stones fall from the skies." It is not remembered as one of his more brilliant concepts.

The cause of this phenomenon will no doubt be understood someday; today it is not. In the meantime, science is not served by smug dismissals of witnesses, many of whom, like me, have experienced this for decades, and have subjected our observations to rigorous scrutiny.

 

It may not have anything to do with intensity or strength of your EMF but more to do with how it resonates with the frequency of the lights power supply. Setting up an interferance pattern that blocks or neutralises the voltage or amps.
If i am not misten the bodies EMF is an alternating frequency and could very well interfere with things like street lights and computers...especially when using the internet under strees or urgency.

edit: I went in to our local welfare agency to check for employment prospects and found that the touch screen monitors I used could only be changed by using my right hand only...my left hand just couldn't cause any effect,.. maybe they should put up a sign saying touch screens fro right handers only.....ha

just a maybe and of course unprovable at present...

 

Considering that it's stated that the human body burns off the same energy as a 120 Watt lightbulb, it would suggest to me that the human body would be incapable of generating the power necessary to interfere with Lighting like 'Sliders' suggest they have.

However there are a few other theories:
one is that perhaps the person is radiologically 'tapped' by a government or research institute, this is not uncommon since the public doesn't get a say on if they are used or not.

However with the advent of greater mobile phone arrays, the likelihood that it would continue to effect lights 'accidentally' is somewhat wrong (It was potentially understandable with satellites)

The other theory works similar to the basis of friction generated by Aluminium, where the person passing by the electrical current generates a field deviation that interferes with the power supply. (Obviously the power does flow up the post) As you can tell it's similar to Quantum Quacks however you'd have to be in close proximity of the Lamp post, what you'd really need to try is finding a lamp post on a slant or shaped different placing more distance between you and the post to see if that is the case.

 

I have same thing happen to me!!! I thought I was alone on this issue. Seriously, it got to the point one time for about a week where it REALLY started to freak me out. This took place about 2 years ago.

One night during that week, my boyfriend and I were visiting some friends at thier house. Well, we all took a walk through the neighborhood because it was a beautiful night. Then I noticed that when I was walking by someone's driveway, the light on thier garage turned off as I had passed. Then a few houses down, another light did the same as I passed. I was curious... these lights have been turning off as I would pass for about a week by then and I wanted to make sure I wasn't loosing my mind. I told my boyfriend and friends to hold up while I tried something. I spotted a few more houses with lights on them and I walked ahead of the group next to the houses, and almost as if they were on que, the lights shut off as I passed. This sparked some questions lol. Then I told them I would wait there and watched as they walked by some homes to see if the lights shut off with them. I stood there and watched as they walked by and the lights remained on. Then I started walking toward them past the SAME lights that they walked by and... yes... the lights shut off as I passed them.

We were startled. It still happens VERY frequently to me but I've gotten so use to it that I don't even notice anymore. Still creeps my boyfriend out from time to time but he's pretty use to it by now.

ALSO another thing kinda related has been happening to me ALOT lately.

In the passed 3 months or so, I've had atleast 25-30 lightbulbs go out in my house. Because we have high rise ceilings and no latter and I would feel weird calling someone to change my lightbulbs lol, its at the point where we have no light in my office, living room or both of our bedrooms. Also, I got tired of standing on chairs and boxes and changing them every couple days. I'd rather sit in darkness damnit. lol As a licenced electrician, I've check the circuits and breakers and I'm getting steady voltage and amps within the normal range. This also happened alot in our old house. And the bulbs don't just burn out when I turn them on and get that infamous blue flash. There's been more times than I can count where I can just walk in a room and the light will pop and die. For example, this last happened last week. I was in the office and the ceiling fan light was on in the living room. I was going to get something to drink from the kitchen and when I walked in the living room the light burned out.

Because of my experiences, I firmly believe that something else is going on here. Something to do with electrical waves and the human body. But I'm not a physicist or biologist so I have no real idea, just personal experience.

 

As with most things there is a vast spectrum of reason, logic and physics as to why things are and happen the way they do.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it is impossible to say 100% what anything is especially when you are addressing another persons experience.

The first most common thing that happens when someone experiences a streetlight going out(or on) is that it is associated with a certain thought pattern.

Anyone that has experienced this thought pattern knows exactly that the thoughts associated with the light going out/on are unique and specific to the light turning on and off.

One of the thoughts in this association is that the light turning on/off is somehow connected to themselves.

The next thought is that the light is communicating something to the individual.

Now anyone that has not experienced this and have had this direct association with a light turning on/off, and thinking feeling this, are at a disadvantage to comment on the phenomenon because without the experience you are looking for some reason to explain why or why not someone should even care about a light turning on or off.

All of you that have experienced this are actually trying to understand the feelings and emotions you are having regarding communication with a light.

You are thinking, "Light, are you going to turn off in about 3 more seconds when I am a few feet closer like you keep doing everytime I pass?"

The light responds, "Yes" by turning off.

You may also notice that the lights are playing with your sense of doubt. They will usually turn on/off at your last moment of doubt.

Many people mention feeling freaked out by this interaction with lights. This makes sense because you are feeling that something greater and more powerful is happening in your life. Really you are having a spiritual experience and higher powers are communicating to you which of course is kinda a freaky thing to have happen.

 

I used to work ambulances as a paramedic. That job sometimes involves long periods with nothing to do. So in order to amuse ourselves we used to turn off street lights as folks walked under them. It was fun to watch them freak out.
Street lights have photo sensors on them, so if you hit the photo sensor with a spot light they will turn themselves off.

 

and they never noticed the spotlight coming from the ambulance?

 

No, the head of the street light is several feet above the head of the individual and we would do it from behind the individual. So no they never saw the spotlight.

 

yes yes , we heard you the first time.
lol

 

glad to finally be part of a club

This happens to me as well. I do have a bit of an explanation for my specific experience. The lights that turn off (more frequent) or on (not as frequent but still happens on occasion) seem to all be metal halide lamps with magnetic ballast; likely retrofits from older sodium-vapor lamps. I worked for a number of years in the commercial and residential lighting repair/fabrication industry, so my background knowledge here is based on something more than pure conjecture. These lamps all have pretty specific needs regarding voltage and current regulation and the resulting emf/rf bands that they work with and throw off are also fairly narrow. It is certainly possible that for whatever reason I happen to interfere with these frequencies. It may also just be coincidence, but it seems strange to me that the only lights I ever notice flicking on or off are metal halides. I know the type of lamp because of their light spectrum. Sodium lights are your standard ugly yellow; metal halides are a much cleaner blue or white. More often than not its a singly lonely MH lamp amidst a group of SOX lamps, which is why I notice them. It could be that those are the only lights with any sort of sensor on them, but its more likely that they are a retrofit replacement bulb for older streetlamps.

along a similar line is the fact that I have a tendency to be able to repair non-functioning electronics/computers with my mere proximity. again, its possible that I just have a knack for knowing how to make things work, but generally I'll follow the same troubleshooting process as anybody else that knows anything about anything but in the end things "miraculously" start working again when I'm done. anything from watches to phones, video games, cameras, and toys, etc.

I now work as a sound recordist for film/tv/etc. unfortunately for me, wireless microphone recievers only pick up static when I'm wearing them. They work fine if I put them down on a table or something, but as soon as I clip them to my belt or mixer they're just full of white noise. I'm certain I'm either putting out wide spectrum rf noise or just acting as an rf filter, like a ferrite bead. One of these days I'm going to build a theramin and see how it reacts to me. I also know a grip and part time camera operator who has trouble finding work because he blows lightbulbs like its his job.