Woman Reports Mysterious Multicolored Lights near Holy Hill in Wisconsin

I was contacted recently by a woman named Holly who wished to recount her experience with a set of mysterious multicolored lights near Holy Hill in Wisconsin.

According to Holly’s initial report:

I was in Hartford, Wisconsin on December 23rd, 1972, at my parent's home in the Holy Hill area northwest of Milwaukee, amidst rural countryside with no streetlights, just rolling farmland and a few widely scattered homes. The time was 11:45 p.m., I was watching TV. It had been snowing all night, a beautiful fluffy snowfall with an accumulation of about one foot. The room I was sitting in had a 30-foot panoramic window with a southwest view of the outdoor six acres of my parent's home with woods, hills, and a large pond as well as down a hill to a distant farmer's field. It was a pitch-black night outside as heavy clouds had been dumping snow. No stars or moon.
Suddenly I was startled to see it become as bright as noon outside. I know the exact time of 11:45 p.m. because I looked at a clock to reassure me it wasn't sunrise. How was it possible to be as bright and extensive as daylight outside at that time of night, I wondered to myself. I considered that the clouds broke, and a full moon was lighting the woods, hills and pond on the six acres around the house that I could see from my vantage point.
Everything was lit with equal brightness, no shadows, as if a noon sun was overhead. The home did not have outdoor lights, so I ruled out that possibility. I considered that there must be an unusually bright moon popping through the heavy cloud cover, when suddenly the light outside turned red, as if someone flipped a switch, then after a minute or more the light flipped to blueish-green, then after a time back to white light. I ruled out an overhead helicopter because it was dead silent outside and rotor wash would have affected the trees and powdery snow everywhere. Furthermore, light from a helicopter would have been a spotlight or flare, neither which produce that kind of all-around light. And why would that happen over my parent's house in the middle of a snowfall in the middle of the night. Makes no sense!
After 10 minutes, I watched the light steadily dim and seemingly flow from my parent's acreage to faintly lighting the distant farmer's field and fading to nothing. I never did see the moon at any time. And when the light dimly lit the farmer's field, I couldn't detect anything above the land to create such an effect (like a helicopter). The sky was pitch-black and still no moon.
The next day I phoned Milwaukee Journal’s weatherman, Milwaukee’s airport tower, and a Navy office in Milwaukee to report what I saw and inquire if others had phoned in reports. They didn’t know anything. Here's what is strange. I have diligently searched online for the recorded weather (moon phases, too) and precipitation reports for the particular date (and close dates) as well as for any news or citizen accounts of bright lights in the Holy Hill area, and I've found nothing.
Do you have an opinion what weather condition would create bright lighting effects in the middle of a snowy winter night? A weather phenomenon would have simultaneously lit a broad expanse of the hills and woods (and homes) adjacent to my parents' property, not just a specific six acres, isn't that right?
It would ease my mind, after all these years, for an explanation of what created bright light at midnight or if other Hartford, Wisconsin residents reported something similar.

Admittedly, I was at a loss to explain Holly’s experience and told her so. No known natural phenomenon could be responsible, and no terrestrial technology was visibly present. Naturally curious, I asked if she had noticed anything else odd around that time.

"There may have been a couple of strange things that happened in conjunction with the lights," she responded. "I went to my parent's bedroom to wake them about the lights. I couldn't wake either of them. I tried for two or three minutes, gently shaking my mom by her shoulder and talking in her ear. She has ALWAYS been a light sleeper. I couldn't wake her. Very strange when you shake someone and talk in their ear, and they don't wake up."

Furthermore, Holly continued, "My husband was in the room with me watching TV at the time the lights started. He stopped talking and wouldn't go to the window with me to observe the strange phenomena. He also wouldn't get up to help me pry a door open to the outside which had been blocked by a couple feet of freshly fallen snow. I wanted to get outside to look above the house where the source of the lights might have been coming from. He just sat there like a dummy, not saying anything, expressionless, not even budging to look at the lights at the window with me when I asked. That surprised me at the time, but I was intent on discovering the source of the lights."

Although she was only in her parent's room for a few minutes while trying to wake them, when Holly returned, her husband asked where she had been for so long. "What do you mean?" she replied. But he remained eerily silent.

"I thought that was weird because I couldn't have been in my parents' room more than three minutes and walked directly back to the living room. I didn't think to look at a clock to confirm how long I had been away from the living room because that seemed of no matter," she told me. "Knowing what I know now, having heard/read other peoples' strange experiences, I would have tried all sorts of things at the time to determine the source of the lights that made the outdoors look like noon at midnight."

While I was able to track down historical weather data for the date of Holly’s experience, the closest recording center in that area is General Mitchell International Airport, which is several dozen miles to the southeast of Hartford. General Mitchell didn’t record any precipitation on December 23rd, but given the distance, it certainly seems possible that it snowed at Holy Hill and not the airport. The moon was waning gibbous at the time and would have been in the sky during Holly’s experience, although if there was cloud cover in her area, that could explain why she didn’t see it.

Whatever happened that night, it remains a mystery.

“I have contacted SETI and a multitude of meteorologists (who have never responded) about the lights. I am left with nothing else to explain the event than some sort of paranormal or UAP occurrence. I wish I knew,” Holly lamented. “The next day my husband would not talk to me OR my parents about the lights. THAT was strange also. My husband was in the Marine Corps and scheduled to leave for Vietnam in a few days after this lights event. Six months later he was killed, so we never had a chance to talk about it. I put it entirely out of my mind for decades because there was no explanation and people laughed at me. I will have to live with it that I am lucky to have seen such a sight.”