People have lived around Lampeter for thousands of years, the earliest evidence being the prehistoric stone circle at Altgoch and a scattering of Bronze Age and Roman remains. There is something enchanting, almost mystical about the town and its surroundings. There are reports of strangely coloured lights in the surrounding hills, particularly around Tregaron bog. Some locals acknowledge this while others remain tight-lipped, choosing perhaps to keep the area’s secrets close.

Lampeter escaped the 1904-5 Welsh Religious Revival but is nevertheless crammed with chapels and churches. By far the largest institution in the town, however, is its university. Founded as St David’s College in 1822 and known today as the University of Wales, Lampeter, it is the oldest university institution in England and Wales apart from Oxford and Cambridge. Its original building, next to the remains of an old motte and bailey castle, was modelled on the older Oxford colleges, with an enclosed, grassed quadrangle embraced by the founding institution of St David’s. Today the University of Wales, Lampeter is the smallest university in Britain, but its size belies its excellent academic reputation. Unsurprisingly, given the rich religious and spiritual heritage of the surrounding area, subjects such as philosophy and theology have also gained a growing and acknowledged academic respect in recent years.

Perhaps this is why in the summer of 2000 it became the home of the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC). Originally housed at Manchester College, Oxford, by the time it arrived in Lampeter the centre held almost 6,000 accounts of spiritual, religious and paranormal experiences, many unexamined and most entirely unpublished. Amongst these 6,000 accounts are a large number of accounts of unusual light, and these are the subject-matter and central focus of this book. As will become clear as this chapter unfolds, these cannot be properly explored or understood without first pausing to consider the history of the RERC and its founder, Sir Alister Hardy.

Born in 1896, from a very early age Hardy was clearly aware of a spiritual ‘presence’ in his life, but he gives repeated indications in his writings that this was not something he saw as the exclusive preserve of any one religion, and not even as something that needed to be looked for in religion at all. His own unpublished autobiography records how he loved to walk in the countryside as a boy, wandering along river banks near his Northamptonshire home ‘at times almost with a feeling of ecstasy’. So overwhelming at times were his feelings of gratitude for the beauties of nature that

Already by 1919, with Hardy not yet twenty-five years old, we see the interests that were to dominate his life clearly in place. On the one hand we see the marine biologist, at home in the world of science and seeking to carve out a career there. On the other we see the mystic, open to the presence of the spiritual but alienated from the religious orthodoxies of his day. And somewhere between the two we see the maverick: not afraid to tackle controversial subjects such as telepathy, nor afraid of attempting to build a bridge between the seemingly unbridgeable worlds of science and the spirit. Perhaps in seeking to build such a bridge he was seeking some reconciliation within himself. Or perhaps he was early on seeking to resolve some of the contradictions of the age in which he lived: contradictions that still in many ways remain within our own.

Before leaving, however, Hardy did something that showed that he had not forgotten the vow he had made in 1914. Giving his address as RRS Discovery, c/o Foreign Fleet Division, London, he lodged a request with a press-cutting agency to collect and save for his return any newspaper cuttings concerning subjects ‘dealing with or referring even remotely to: Religion, God, Faith, Prayer, Relations or antagonism of Religion and Science [and] Anything in fact of a religious or spiritual nature’. Underneath this, Hardy added a list of things he did not want to receive, which included ‘Ecclesiastical or church notices or news, reports of services or sermons (unless arousing public interest or controversy), obituary or other notes on the lives of ministers of any denomination, or dealing with psychic research, spiritualism and kindred subjects (unless in a religious connection)’.

Much later in his life, Hardy would expand on this request, writing that in September 1925, three months before the Discovery expedition finally got under way after lengthy delays, ‘My attention had been arrested by a description of a religious experience in the daily press. How often, I wondered, did such reports occur and pass unnoticed?’ Clearly Hardy intended to find out, and by lodging the request with the agency he started in motion a series of varied appeals for religious experiences that would eventually yield almost 6,000 accounts. The request not to receive anything ‘dealing with psychic research, spiritualism and kindred subjects’ is puzzling, considering how much of his later life would be devoted to the exploration of phenomena such as telepathy. From comments made in later years, however, it is clear that Hardy was attempting to avoid the issue of human survival after death, deeming it to be something that fell outside the field of his already wide inquiry. In the event, he was to receive many accounts bearing directly on this subject, including reports of apparitions and near-death experiences together with a diverse range of other ‘paranormal’ events. It is to his credit that he replied to and filed away everything he received, even if it was clear that it was not necessarily what he was looking for. Indeed, he would later write that ‘the mine of our material awaits a host of researchers’, and to this day many of the accounts that Hardy collected throughout his life remain largely unexamined and unpublished, including most of those that make up this study.

What Hardy was looking for at this time would become clearer as the years passed, when his method of describing the sorts of religious experiences he was seeking became more refined. As would become evident, he was in a key sense looking for reports from persons who had a continuous, ongoing sense of the presence of Something or Someone else in their lives: rather like his own Northamptonshire experiences, but continuously. In the event, he received much more than this, drawing the observation of one commentator that ultimately he became ‘like a fisherman casting his net upon the water, but instead of coming up with a few well-defined fish, [finding] he had caught a great array of glittering creatures that did not seem to fit his preconceived grouping’ (Maxwell and Tschudin 1990: 6).

None of this was evident in 1925, however. In fact, he found the first batch of press cuttings that were sent to him to be wholly unsatisfactory for the purposes of his research. Next, he tried appealing for experiences in thirty religious journals, but received barely 200 replies that were once again unusable. It seemed that people had difficulty understanding what sort of thing he was after. In addition, as he was later to...