Growing up in Joplin, MO in the 1940's and 50's, I have witnessed what was called the "Spook Light" or the "Hornet Spook Light," since it's near a crossroad called Hornet I went a couple of times. It appears after dark. Looking down an old country road about a quarter mile or more away, the light appeared about 20 to 30 degrees above the horizon. The nights I was there it didn't move. And it was reasonably bright. Others who saw it had different experiences.

As this video shows, the Light has been studied by some serious investigators. But they couldn't agree on a cause. It is a UFO in the sense that it is an Unidentified Floating Object. None of us at the time thought it was anything extraterrestrial, although the Flying Saucer craze was popular then.

Anyone here see anything similar. Or has anyone here seen this Spook Light? Or, better yet, has anyone got an answer as to what it really is? (By the way, the car you see with people standing behind it in the video is a 1953 Pontiac.)

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u24EA3_2ag

Wikipedia sure isn't impressed:

"It is caused by the misidentification of distant car headlights."

"...headlights of cars driving east on Route 66 are unexpectedly visible in the distance..."

"The first to recognize this in print was AB MacDonald in a January 1936 issue of the Kansas City Star.[2]​ This has been demonstrated repeatedly by experiments in which fireworks, spot lights, and flashing car headlights along Route 66 have been seen by observers posted on Spooklight Road."

"...storytellers have created mythologies about the Spooklight to purport that it existed before cars[6]​[1]​ but none of these claims can be verified by any printed sources."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spooklight

I find it hard to take anything seriously that describes moving light whilst showing a moving camera (TS: 00:18-00:22).
This isn't improved by the supporting evidence for the claim "even Popular Mechanics covered the spook light in the 1960s" being a random cover of Popular Mechanics from the 1960s with nothing on the cover refering even vaguely to the spook light. (TS: 02:00-02:06).
And I really should have stopped watching there, as there are no meaningful bits in the content that follows, just the same ancient low-quality b/w images replayed in cycle.

Can't someone sic the SWR crew onto this thing? At least then there'd be contemporary multispectral footage that could actually be analysed.

Unless there's actually some evidence that it's not car headlights, then that seems to be what it is.

Is there actually a photo or video where the precise location of the camera is known? I could do a recreation in Sitrec.