According to legend every year the naga of the Mekong River honors the anniversary of the return of the Buddha from the heavens by sending balls of fire skyward. These glowing red orbs rise from the river in majestic silence, accompanied by much celebration on the part of the nearby villagers. After all, this is the breath of the giant serpent that serves as the guardian of their river, mystically coinciding on the last night of the Buddhist Lent.
According to the Tourism Authority of Thailand the best place to view said mystical experience is in the Phon Pisai district along the riverside and is favorably accompanied by glasses of ale or local rice whiskey.
The story of the Naga Fireballs, also known as the bung fai paya nak is full of these seeming contradictions. But thus is the result when miracles appear in modern times. Every year on the full moon night of the eleventh lunar month (October) a festive atmosphere takes hold. Parades featuring the image of the naga wind through Phon Pisai, longboats float by adorned with thousands of candles, and food vendors line the streets hawking their wares to excited tourists.
But just how miraculous are the fireballs? According to local villagers they’ve been seen on this site for hundreds of years, the local temple housing written records from monks of Octobers past witnessing the miraculous sight. To them these fireballs are more than just an annual money-maker, they are a reaffirmation of their faith in the mystical nature of the world around them and in their own special river guardian.
To the people that live here the Naga is very real indeed. Locals pass down stories of sightings of the creature, including ones as recent as the last decades. Workmen tearing down and replacing a temple in the area reported being chased off by a huge snake-like creature in 1992, while in 1997 a group of 50 people- including Phon Pisasi’s Chief of Police- spotted a large serpent swimming up the Mekong. They estimated it to around two hundred and thirty feet long.
Then there’s one of the most common souvenirs sold here is a postcard showing a band of over 15 U.S. service men supporting the weight of a giant silvery, eel like fish with the caption Queen of Nagas written below. Legend has it that, much like the hapless men who opened the tomb of King Tut, everyone in the picture died prematurely and that their huge catch disappeared on its way to America.
This postcard is where most skeptics start when working on debunking the phenomenon. Several online commentators, including the notable Brian Dunning, have tracked down the original source for the image: a 1996 issue of Ocean Realm, which labels it as a 23-foot oarfish found by a group of SEAL instructors in Coronado, CA. Both the Oarfish and the instructors all made it back home safely.
But even if the picture is fake, surely the phenomena itself is harder to explain? Well, yes and no. There are those who have tried to come up with a scientific explanation for the fireballs, most notably one local Dr. Manas Kanoksilpa, who insists that the fireballs are “globules of methane and nitrogen formed from decomposed organic matter trapped deep beneath the Mekong.” On the day when the sun is nearest the Earth, apparently the same time of the festival, these balls self-combust when they rise above the water and remain alight until they run out of fuel.
Luckily for those who insist on the miraculous nature of the fireballs there are plenty who criticize the theory, none the least being the villagers themselves who raise excellent questions. First of all, the Mekong is a swiftly flowing river, how then does decomposing matter become trapped under the water? And why does this phenomenon only occur in the Mekong, and not in other rivers in the area? And even if all of this could be accounted for, why do the fireballs come out as balls rather than plumes of gas? Given enough thought the hypothesis falls apart even further, especially when one examines how hard it is to spontaneously ignite methane in the first place.
But there are other, more likely, possibilities for the origin of the fireballs including one televised account of a group of journalists who hid on the other side of the river and filmed Laotian soldiers firing tracer rounds in the air to applause from the other side. Indeed, the regularity and consistency of the fireballs proves to many skeptics that this is probably the most likely source of the fireballs.
Of course, this explanation ignores the stories of the villagers who insist that the fireballs are an ancient phenomena. Villagers like Pang Butamee, 70, who reported to Time Magazine that she has seen the fireballs since she was little girl, and that her mother and father saw them as well.
But however you look at the Naga fireballs, whether it is as a skeptic seeing nothing more than a fancy firework show or as a believer watching the miraculous breath of an age-old guardian, they are a beautiful example of how myth both struggles and succeeds in surviving in the modern world.