This article is a reply to Ralph Noyes’ contribution in Magonia 32. Whatever Ralph Noyes is skilled at it is not using dictionaries! Although he looked at several dictionaries he quotes only the Concise Oxford Dictionary and then not the latest edition. If he had looked at the 1978 Concise he would have found an additional and important definition, viz. ‘widely held but unjustified idea of the effects or nature of a thing’. 
In Magonia (August 1988) Peter Rogerson writes that ufologists must accept that as recorders of stories we are in effect folklorists, and this is how our writings may be regarded by historians in centuries to come: “the dominant folklore in British ufology at the moment appears to be earthlights or spooklights … the powerful appeal of this concept lies in its romantic roots. It is a folklore of open spaces, where tales still survive of the eeriest secrets of wild nature, before TV and streetlights robbed them of their wonder.“