Unlocking the Atmospheric Secrets of the
Marfa Mystery Lights
(continued)
Car headlights, for sure, I thought. Headlights from far, far away. But wait! They suddenly jumped, split into two, and bloomed like a flower before my eyes. Then the lights shrank back to pinpricks in the night.
Bewildered, I tried to think of an explanation—a non-alien explanation. It must be a mirage or an atmospheric effect contorting car headlights. But I couldn’t know for sure. I leaned against my car and gazed into the distance for a few more minutes. The mysterious lights waned. Then they disappeared. I jumped into my car and disappeared from Marfa myself.
Convinced that incandescent bulbs produce the photons that become the Marfa Lights—photons that the atmosphere’s complexities then morph into legend and lore—I endeavored to learn more about what others had already discovered about the phenomenon. All I could gather, however, was a hodgepodge of theories attempting to explain the mysterious lights: St. Elmo’s Fire, ball lightning, the ignition of emitted natural methane, rock-reflected moonlight, energized particles that rain down from the Van Allen Radiation Belts, a top secret Air Force project (a small USAF tethered balloon radar outpost lies just outside of Marfa), and all sorts of derivations and combinations of the aforementioned. In addition, other ideas about the source of the lights abound: alien landing lights (of course), ghosts, aliens themselves, time machines, maybe even Elvis.
Marfa’s Mystery in History
Nearly a decade after my first Marfa experience, a group of University of Texas researchers descended upon Marfa, intent on identifying the source of the ghostly lights. The team carefully observed their amorphous subjects using a variety of tools, including video cameras and chase cars on Route 67. Their conclusion? The Marfa Mystery Lights originate from incandescent bulbs—manufactured on Earth—mounted to speeding vehicles (also manufactured on Earth). Video clips of the lights, subsequently viewed at a high frame rate by the physicists, consistently showed them moving along the same path in the far distance: U.S. Route 67.
But, naysayers argue, dozens of newspaper articles reference “written documentation” of people who witnessed the lights as long ago as the 1880s, which predates both cars and Route 67, which was built in the early part of the twentieth century. Texas writer Michael Hall, in the course of diligent research, found that the earliest written documentation of the phenomenon appeared in a February 1945 San Angelo Times article titled “Ghost Light Appears in Marfa Area.” Contrary to conspiracy theorists who frequent online message boards and use the so-called “written documentation” to boost their theories, there was nothing before that.
So just what makes these lights so much more remarkable than the countless highway lights beaming throughout the world at any given moment? The lights themselves aren’t remarkable, but the atmospheric lens through which visitors see these commonplace light sources can undoubtedly be described as far from ordinary.
Knowing that the atmosphere works in strange and complex ways, I wondered if mirages make the lights dance and bounce so mysteriously. It’s possible this is so, but in order to understand the Marfa Lights with any depth and accuracy, I found that I would need to enter the world not just of the mirage, but of the governing mechanism behind this atmospheric peculiarity: refraction.
