User:Bigbender9/sandbox

Mysterious lights have been observed in the vicinity of Marfa, Texas, in the United States for many decades. They are now most commonly known as Marfa lights. But other terms, such as ghost lights are also mentioned.

The Marfa lights have gained a measure of fame as some observers, lacking a scientific explanation, have ascribed the lights to paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, UFOs, or Will-o'-the-wisp. Each year, Marfa celebrates its famous lights with the Marfa Lights Festival on Labor Day weekend.

Viewing of the Marfa lights

Most of the lights have appeared on a 20-mile wide by 20-mile long expanse of land southeast of Marfa. This expanse has been called the Marfa flat, Marfa plain, and Mitchell flat (after the pioneering Mitchell family which settled on the land in the late 1800s).

The most common Marfa lights are seen from the Marfa Lights Viewing Center (MLVC) which is on the northern side of the Marfa flat about nine miles east of the town of Marfa on US 90. Most of these lights originate from vehicles on US67 that are traveling northward, down the mountainside, toward Marfa. The lights are about 20 miles away from both the viewing center and the town of Marfa.

The Texas Department of Transportation opened the MLVC in 2001 to provide visitors with a safe place to view the lights. The viewing deck is built well above the desert floor. It is angled toward the direction of the most commonly seen lights – that is, between southwest and west-southwest. The unattended center has restrooms, information about the lights, and binoculars for observing them.

There is no easy way to approach an ongoing display of the Marfa lights, either from the MLVC or the ranch roads entering the Marfa flat. All of the land on the Marfa flat is private property, and access is prohibited without explicit permission from the owners. It would also be foolish to enter any of these properties on foot. Marfa sits in the Chihuahuan Desert. Rattle snakes hunt for food at night.

Appearance of the Marfa lights

Many popular reports have appeared over the years offering a great range of descriptions of the lights. It is said that the lights can be bright, dim, glowing, floating high in the air, or close to the ground. Colors are usually described as white, yellow, orange or red; but green and blue are sometimes reported. The balls are said to hover, or to move laterally at low speeds, or sometimes to shoot around rapidly in any direction. They often appear in pairs or groups, and are reported to divide into pairs or to merge, to disappear and reappear, and occasionally to move in seemingly regular patterns. Sometimes they are described as being the size of soccer balls or basket balls. Most commonly, they are the size of small white dots on the horizon. In fact, the range of descriptions of the appearances of the lights and their movements is so large that they do not seem to define anything specific.

According to the people who claim to have seen the lights, they can persist from a fraction of a second to several hours. There is evidently no connection between appearances of the Marfa lights and anything else besides nighttime hours. They appear in all seasons of the year and in most weather conditions (except dense fog or torrential rain). They have been observed during late dusk and early dawn, when the landscape is dimly illuminated. They are viewable year round. There are no reliable reports of daytime sightings.

History

The first published account of mysterious lights in the greater Marfa area came from Judge O.W. Williams. His pamphlet (conceived around 1902 and published around 1920) recounted the story of an Apache Chief, Alsate, who was killed by the Mexicans in Ojinaga, Mexico about 1880. (Ojinaga is across the Rio Grande from present day Presidio, Texas). Following Alsate’s death, his ghost was seen at night by people in the Big Bend region of Texas. O.W. Williams’ contribution to the literature of the Marfa lights is commemorated in a plaque at the MLVC.

The story of an Apache ghost appears again in the July 1957 issue of Coronet magazine. Here, the term Ghost Light is used to describe the mysterious light seen at night.

In 1976, the mythology of the Marfa lights was treated by Elton Miles in his book, Tales of the Big Bend. By the time of his book, the story of mysterious lights at Marfa had grown to mythical proportions, but it had not developed similarly on a factual basis.

The Marfa lights were featured as an episode, titled “Ghost Lights”, on the American TV series Unsolved Mysteries. Aired in 1989, the show presented several eye-witness accounts, and then invited a group of scientists from the McDonald Observatory and Sul Ross State University to examine the lights. The scientists (chemist, astronomer, and geologist) saw and photographed a light but were unable to identify it, or to explain its origin.

More recently, the lights were the subject of “Cantore Stories” on the Weather Channel on April 24, 2010. In this case, as in the Unsolved Mysteries episode, history and discussion of the lights were presented, and anecdotal accounts were given. But, there were no revealing videos of the lights, nor any explanation of their sources.

In 1989, Judith Brueske began to move the written literature of the Marfa lights in a more fact-based direction, away from the primarily mythological form it had enjoyed since the first writings of O.W. Williams. Her book contained reports of sightings of mysterious lights that had been personally seen by people she interviewed. No second-hand reports were included. In contrast to the many other accounts that are clearly of automobile lights, the stories in her book truly were strange and mysterious.

About a decade later, James Bunnell sought to understand the mystery by photographing lights on the Marfa flat and adjoining mountainsides. He used cameras that he personally operated as well as automated cameras placed on the Marfa flat. His photographic activities continued for almost 10 years, yielding a book in 2003 and another in 2009. In addition to photographing the lights, he teamed with Karl D. Stephan et al. in an examination of the spectra of various light sources to see if any uniqueness would identify the light as belonging to the “mysterious” category. No such signature was found.

Ultimately, Bunnell concluded that Marfa light appearances are rare. According to Bunnell, the odds of a true Marfa light being seen on a randomly chosen night are about 3 percent.

But, if you visit the MLVC on any evening that isn’t fogged in or experiencing a torrential downpour, you will see lights moving about, dividing and merging, etc. These are vehicle lights, and Bunnell has simply defined them not to be part of the family of Marfa lights.

The vehicle lights that Bunnell is excluding are the very ones for which the MLVC was built. And, they were thoroughly investigated in May 2004 by a group of physics students from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). The students spent four days recording lights observed southwest of the MLVC using traffic-volume monitoring equipment, video cameras, binoculars, and chase cars. Their report contained the following conclusions:

• U.S. Highway 67 is visible from the MLVC.
• The frequency of lights southwest of the MLVC correlates with the frequency of vehicle traffic on US67.
• The motion of the observed lights was in a straight line, corresponding to US67.
• When the group parked a vehicle on US67 and flashed its headlights, the flashing lights were visible at the MLVC and appeared to be a Marfa light.
• A car passing the parked vehicle on US67 appeared as one Marfa light passing another to a viewer at the MLVC.

The UTD students came to the conclusion that all of the lights observed over a four-night period southwest of the MLVC could be reliably attributed to automobile headlights traveling along US67 between Presidio and Marfa, Texas.

The most recent contribution to the history and technology of the Marfa lights appeared in the early part of 2013. Robert and Judy Wagers conducted an extensive review of the history of mysterious light sightings in the greater Marfa region from the earliest myths up to modern times. From this, they culled out first-hand reports (some from Brueske’s book) for scientific investigation.

Their analyses examined the luminous properties of a light source, the transmission properties of air, and the physics of light propagation to determine from what distance a light could be seen. These facts were combined with spectral information (in some cases), geographical information, and meteorological facts at the times the sightings occurred, to produce likely explanations for the bizarre light sightings. In addition to explaining the US67 lights, their book presents:

• Mysterious lights seen from the town of Marfa in 1928-1932,
• A mirage that twists road stripes sideways,
• Mountains that seem to move closer, as Robert Reed Ellison described in his 1937 memoirs about his 1883 trip across the Marfa plain,
• Lights that change color,
• Lights that move upward at Aragon, Texas and on the 101 Flat east of Marfa, and
• A blue-green ball of light on top of a red ball of light that chased a car.

Reports of similar nocturnal lights

Appearances of apparently similar lights have been reported worldwide. Will-o'-the-wisp, is a good example of such a paranormal phenomenon. A more scientifically based example of optical phenomena similar to the Marfa lights comes from the Min Min lights of Australia. An example of automobile lights seen at great distance, like those on US67 outside of Marfa, are the Spooklights seen on US66 from a location in Oklahoma just across the border from Hornet, Missouri. These same lights were previously described in a 1965 publication of Popular Mechanics.

Explanations

Skeptics discount paranormal sources for the lights, attributing them to mistaken sightings of ordinary nighttime lights, such as distant vehicle lights, ranch lights, or astronomical objects. Critics also note that the MLVC is located at the site of the Marfa Army Airfield, where tens of thousands of personnel were stationed between 1942 and 1946, training American and Allied pilots. This massive field was then used for years as a regional airport, with daily airline service. In addition to the Marfa AAF, there were seven auxiliary army air fields, each constantly patrolled by sentries. Critics consider it unlikely that any actual mysterious phenomena would have remained unobserved, unmentioned, and unfound by the U.S. Army.

The modern equivalent of that argument is that no rancher in the Marfa area would allow an unexplained, repeatable, light on his property to go unchallenged. If the rancher couldn’t resolve the origin of the light, he’d call in the U.S. Border Patrol, which maintains a very high presence in the area.

To explain what the Marfa lights are, we need a working definition of what a Marfa light is. It was noted above that Bunnell excluded known lights from the family of “true” Marfa lights. But that decision is arbitrary, and dismisses the documentation that lights (now shown to be headlights on US67) have been seen regularly from the vicinity of the current MLVC at least as far back as the 1920s. And, Marfa residents viewing these lights referred to them as “Marfa lights” and “ghost lights”.

Since every light seen on and around the Marfa flat is called a “Marfa light” by someone, they all need to be considered in any comprehensive explanation. To help organize the possible light options, it is useful to associate them with four questions:

• Is the light visible on a repeatable basis (say every evening)?
• Is the light stationary or moving?
• Is it above or below the horizon?
• Is the light white, or colored?

The decision tree on the chart below provides possible answers to these four questions. The chart is divided into two segments. The upper portion is a decision tree for lights that are repeatable. The lower portion is a decision tree for lights whose appearance is not repeatable.

Marfa Lights Decision Tree

A few bits of analysis, like the one above about using the U.S. Border Patrol will lead to possible sources of light such as those shown on the right-hand side of the chart. One major conclusion is that if the light appears in a location repeatedly, it’s not mysterious at all. The very fact that it appears regularly will cause someone to determine what the light is. But, even though it is not “mysterious”, it’s still a “Marfa light”.

All the sources that are not repeatable are potentially mysterious. And, they each require a different explanation. The chart also shows that some of the lights in the “not repeatable” category (which are colored green) are from well-known sources. But, if you only get to see a light once, you are not likely to discover that it is a common source of light. To you, it will remain a mystery. The sources colored yellow are mysterious in some way. They also constitute a very small fraction of the possible lights seen during the hours after sunset.

In addition to the possible sources of the lights, there arise questions about the appearances of the lights. The explanations of appearances are different from the explanations of sources.

One phenomenon mentioned by believers and skeptics alike is that the lights experience some sort of interaction with the temperature gradients in the air over the Marfa plain. In the treatment of the mysterious lights done by the Wagers couple, they included refraction of the light beam in their analyses. It was shown to have an effect in all cases. But, it was not always the dominant effect needed for an explanation.