Kennedy Center Names Its Honorees for 2013

September 20, 2013

Pop star Billy Joel in 2011.

Welcome to American Mosaic from VOA Learning English.

I’m Faith Lapidus.

On the show today, we tell all about this year’s Kennedy Center honorees. And we play music by some of the honored artists.

But first, we look into the mystery of stange lights that sometimes glow above a mountain in North Carolina.

Brown Mountain Lights

For almost one hundred years, people have looked up at the night sky over a certain part of North Carolina and wondered: what is that? They see sometimes see balls of light high above them. So far there is no clear explanation of where these lights come from or what they are made of. Jim Tedder has our story.

The mystery began in September of nineteen-thirteen. A man was fishing at night in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There was no sound, but suddenly unusual lights began to appear over Brown Mountain. The fisherman said they were red and round, like a ball. They were unlike anything he had seen before. They came back night after night.

He told some friends about what he had seen. The Charlotte Daily Observer newspaper wrote about the story. A worker for the United States Geological Survey visited the area to investigate. He decided that what the fisherman and others had seen was nothing more than lights from a train. End of story.