The Naga fireballs of the Mekong

The Naga fireballs are glowing balls said to rise from the Mekong River, between Thailand and Laos, on the night Buddhist Lent ends. Many believers hold them sacred, and they draw tourists every year.

TIME reported in 2002 that locals call the lights bung fai paya nak, the Naga fireballs, and that they have risen from the river each year, on the full-moon night that closes Buddhist Lent, for longer than anyone can recall. Pang Butamee, 70, told TIME she had watched them since childhood, rising out of the river as well as canals and dams. TIME named Wat Paa Luang, a temple about 450 years old, as a favourite place to watch. Wikipedia says locals called them ghost lights until the local council gave them the name phaya nak lights in the mid-1980s, and that they have since become a yearly tourist draw at Wan Ok Phansa.

In 2002 a programme called Code Cracking, on the television network iTV, sent a crew by boat up the Laotian bank opposite Phon Phisai at festival time. According to Brian Dunning's Skeptoid podcast (2009), the only source here for this account, the crew filmed Laotian soldiers shooting tracer fire upward, and each burst drew a reaction from the crowd on the Thai bank. Skeptoid says many viewers saw the broadcast as an assault on a sacred belief, and iTV faced threats of lawsuits and boycotts.

In 2021 the Bangkok Post reported that a Facebook page petitioned the Lao Embassy over what it called evidence that villagers on the Lao side of the Mekong had for years launched flares to fool northeastern Thais. The Laotian Times reported the Lao response: each village said police and border officials had patrolled all that festival night under COVID rules and recorded no incidents.