The Unexplained Texas Ghost Lights

Marfa, Texas, is an odd sort of place. The community of about 1,700 people sits in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, three hours’ drive from the nearest airport, yet it has managed to establish itself on the world stage in more than one way. Its first claim to fame came when an artist called Donald Judd turned up in the early 1970s, started buying up properties to renovate into art installations and exhibition spaces, and now, a few decades on, Marfa has become something of an art hub for hipsters who don’t mind dry heat.

The other reason Marfa is famous is for the lights—the “Marfa Ghost Lights”—strange dancing orbs in the sky that can sometimes be seen across the desert vista just before the sun rises or just after it sets. These lights, which were first documented around 145 years ago, have puzzled locals, tourists, and scientists ever since. Are they otherworldly?

Are they dangerous? What rational explanations could there be? What have dinosaurs got to do with it?

Let’s grab some high-powered binoculars and sit out under the stars to see if we can unravel the mystery of the Marfa ghost lights.

The History of the Mystery

If you’ve heard about these lights before, you may think that there is a very easy and mundane explanation for them, and we’ll get to what they might be later on. What isn’t so easily explained, however, are the very earliest reported sightings of them because they go back a long way. Indigenous tribes, such as the Apaches, put the lights in the desert down to stars falling to earth.

According to the internet, the earliest reported sighting of the lights, at least as far as witnesses who weren’t Native American goes, was in 1883. A cowboy called Robert Reed Ellison was doing his thing with his cows in the desert when he saw some strange lights shining on the horizon. At the time, he thought they might be campfires lit by the Apaches, who may have been noticing more falling stars at the very same time. When other locals also mentioned seeing the lights, a small posse rode out to investigate but couldn’t find any remains of campfires.

Also in the 1880s, other reports from Texans such as O.W. Williams and Joe and Sally Humphreys cemented the strange lights into the desert’s story.

Obviously, as these are also known as “ghost lights,” there is some mystery surrounding the origins of these things, so let’s get going with the possible explanations.

The Otherworldly and the Paranormal

As per a piece by Marc Lallanilla on LiveScience.com:

According to eyewitnesses, the Marfa Lights appear to be roughly the size of basketballs and are varyingly described as white, blue, yellow, red or other colors.

Reportedly, the Marfa Lights hover, merge, twinkle, split into two, flicker, float up into the air or dart quickly across Mitchell Flat (the area east of Marfa where they’re most commonly reported).

Going way back to what the indigenous tribes thought, the lights came across to them as falling stars. That’s as logical an explanation as any when there’s no other context behind seeing some shiny orbs moving about in the distance. There may well have been many comets and similar phenomena witnessed in the night sky that got conflated with these lights over time. As Marfa wasn’t founded until the 1880s, the lights were probably referred to as something else, if indeed anyone actually saw anything.

There are other stories floating about that say things like the lights are lanterns held by the ghosts of Spanish Conquistadors or represent the souls of deceased Native American chiefs, but as the lights are usually observed from quite a distance and there are never any ghostly apparitions seen with them, this is obviously just made-up folklore.

Interestingly, lights have been seen in deserts all over the world, with stories to match. Under one video of the Marfa Lights, several people commented about “Abu Fanos,” a djinn native to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. If you’re wandering about the deserts of the Middle East, don’t follow this light because Abu Fanos is trying to lure you away until you get lost and probably die.

Because these tales can’t be verified, let’s move on to one of this channel’s favourite fall guys: aliens. People sit out and wait for these lights all year round without seemingly worrying about their safety or the safety of the planet in general, so it seems as though these lights aren’t behaving in a weird or aggressive way.

In a filmed news piece for the Texas Country Reporter in 1990, ex-pilot Fritz Kahl was asked if he was ever attacked by “a big ball of fire coming up and buzzing you around.”

Fritz got a bit upset at this apparently made-up story and said: “I just can’t stand that sort of prevarication because that’s what it is. It’s a gross miscarriage of justice to these little devils because they’re friendly.”

Most people who say they’ve seen them describe the lights as “friendly,” and fans of the lights are there to try and see a cool show, not get up close and personal with ET.

While videos and some blurry photos exist of the lights, they’re usually taken from the viewing area set up in Marfa, so anything you can see is really far away. Nobody’s got a close-up look at the lights to see if they are, in fact, attached to alien spaceships or what have you. The official “Marfa Lights Viewing Center” is a handy structure on US Highway 90, about 9 miles out of town. It’s somewhere to set up camp for a few hours of light watching and has free telescopes to use and, more importantly, some toilets.

As far as anyone can tell, the only “close encounters” people have had are occasional anecdotal reports of some balls of light rushing towards them, but there has not been much in the way of research into working out if aliens are trying to communicate. People just go and check out the pretty lights if they happen to appear that night, then go home.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other slightly extraordinary explanations for these lights, of course. Jonathan David Whitcomb, founder of the “Animal Discovery” organization, is a cryptozoologist convinced that there are pterodactyls still flying in the skies above Papua New Guinea. He hasn’t seen them himself, but he has interviewed people who have, which is apparently the next best thing to solid proof. And he’s not just filming people willy-nilly. According to animal-discovery.org:

Jonathan was in a unique position, probably the only person ever to search for a living pterosaur (‘pterodactyl’) as a professional forensic videographer with practical experience interviewing persons while videotaping them.

Three locals were interviewed about their alleged sightings of the creature known as a “ropen,” and this is what Whitcomb’s site says about it:

These videotaped interviews made it clear that the ropen is not just a legend but a real animal.

The American gave Gideon a subtle test of his honesty-credibility by taking advantage of a statement contributed by the young native. Gideon said that the ropen he and six other boys had seen had a mouth like a crocodile. Whitcomb, some time later, drew two similar sketches in the dirt: one with an eye socket similar to that of a crocodile; the other without that prominent eye socket. Gideon immediately chose the sketch that was clearly less like a crocodile.

If the native had been telling a lie, he would likely have chosen the sketch that supported his previous statement. The quickness of his choice of the other sketch supports his honesty.

Whitcomb didn’t get any pterodactyl footage on his expedition, but he drew two examples of animals in the dirt and one of his witnesses pointed to one that didn’t match what other people had said, so that was conclusive proof that he was telling the truth about what he saw—ergo, there must be pterodactyls still in existence. This appears to be how Whitcomb’s mind works.

Anyway, in 2010, Whitcomb threw his two cents into the Marfa Lights mystery by suggesting that the lights were obviously glowing pterosaurs. In a press release, he stated:

Now a cryptozoologist from California has explained the dancing lights of Marfa. Tales of spooks may hold a spark of truth, for recent research implies intelligence directs the lights: Bioluminescent flying predators may be hunting at night and catching a few unlucky Big Brown Bats (…)

According to Jonathan Whitcomb, a cryptozoology author in Long Beach, California, when one of the bioluminescent predators has been glowing for a while, not far above the ground, it will be joined by another of its kind, which will then turn on its own glow. After insects have been attracted to that area, the two creatures will separate, which appears to distant human observers to be one light splitting into two. The predators will fly away from each other for some distance, then turn back and fly together. During the separation, bats may begin feeding on the concentration of insects before being caught from two sides by the larger predators.

Needless to say, this explanation didn’t really set the world of Marfa Lights researchers on fire. It seems unlikely that nobody would have spotted these flying predators around and about other places, as presumably they’d have a slightly larger roaming territory than a specific area in the desert. We can’t conclusively say that the lights aren’t glowing pterodactyls, but that hypothesis makes the dead conquistadors one seem a bit less weird.

Other, More Rational, Explanations

Did you know that in 1942, Marfa was home to an American Army airfield? There were loads of troops training and flying there from 1942 to 1947. In fact, the area where the viewing station is now is on the site of the former airbase. This brings two sides to the Marfa lights conundrum.

The first is that any sightings of weird, unexpected lights zipping across the plains during those five years could easily be pegged to aircraft lights. People viewing them from afar might not be familiar with the types of aircraft being flown, and if there were any formations, this would cause lights to look like they were splitting apart.

Even though planes have lights and frequently fly at night, there’s been at least one occasion where someone, in front of witnesses, has queried what those lights in the sky were as they just seemed a bit odd. Of course, it was just a normal plane, but still, the point is that many supposed extraterrestrial UFO sightings have ended up being standard or sometimes secret civilian or military aircraft.

The other point relating to the airfield is that if there had been any extraterrestrials or pterodactyls lurking about the area, it was being used all the time, and none of the pilots or ground crew mentioned seeing previously-thought-extinct pterosaurs or unexplained aerial phenomena.

Let’s move on to the more famous explanation of the lights. The way that the viewing station is oriented, anyone sitting there is looking towards US Highway 67, also called Presidio Highway. Yes, it has been widely agreed that most lights people see, seemingly moving across the air and disappearing before reappearing again, are just cars driving along the road in the distance.

Some observers think that this cannot be the case, but in 2004, researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas spent a few days actually looking into it properly by monitoring traffic on the highway, using high-powered binoculars from the viewing area, and doing coordinated tests such as flashing headlights from the highway. They concluded that yes, the lights people were seeing from the viewing area were just the lights of cars.

Michael Hall, who wrote an article called “The Truth is out There” for Texas Monthly in 2006, begged to differ, though. He had seen the lights for himself many times over the years:

I’ve seen them at dusk and at midnight, in the summer and the fall, by myself and with other people. They appeared in the darkness south of U.S. 90 between Alpine and Marfa: yellowish-white lights that glowed, faded, disappeared, and returned in different places. Sometimes they changed colors, other times they split apart. (…) But these weren’t car lights. They didn’t move like cars. Sometimes they just sat there, and other times they were absolutely playful, moving and winking at one another. Hell, they danced.

So when he heard of the conclusive findings, his first thought was: car lights, schmar lights. While Wikipedia called the researchers a “group from the Society of Physics Students at the University of Texas at Dallas,” Hall called them “a group of college kids—including members of the UTD Gun Club—and a three-day campout in the mountains. In other words, a high-tech frat party.”

He set out with some high-powered binoculars of his own to stake out the viewing area and see for himself if the mysterious lights of his memory were just a bunch of cars after all. The next part of his article is titled: “I Have Terrible News,” for indeed, using a visual aid and clearing his mind of romantic nostalgia for his dancing lights, Hall is able to deduce that the lights he can see are, in fact, normal vehicles:

The pulsing, flaring, twinkling, blinking, and dimming came as the cars on the road lined up with or pointed away from the viewing center. I didn’t see any merging and splitting, but that would probably come from one car passing another, maybe behind a curve. Ultimately, I could draw a straight line descending from the top left to the bottom right, and the lights were coming on and going off along that line. By the time they got to the bottom, right under Chinati Peak, they were almost out of sight.

And they were almost in Marfa. In that sense they were Marfa lights. But there wasn’t much mystery about them.

Another group from Texas State University conducted a similar experiment in 2011 with the same conclusion. As per the article on unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com: “Using sensitive infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers, they found that the atmospheric conditions of the land outside Marfa were unique; the conditions warped and distorted the lights coming from the highway as they traveled across the land. By the time the lights reached the viewing area, they would look like ‘weird, white, floating orbs.’”

This was explained too easily—it’s the end of the episode. Well, not quite. While these lights are explained easily by the highway in the distance, what about the lights seen before the highway was there? Or the lights that have been described as different sizes and colours, some of which seem to float upwards?

Retired aerospace engineer James Bunnell knows all about the visible car lights, but stresses that the Marfa Lights are actually something different. In a piece called “What’s Going on in Marfa” on Chron.com, he states:

The car lights move from left to right in a repeating pattern, (…) The bona fide Marfa Lights, which appear in the night sky only 10 to 15 times a year, look like balls of light that split apart, then melt back together. Some seem to stand still. Some streak across the sky vertically or, more commonly, horizontally. Sometimes one will turn off and another will turn on as if connected by a light switch.

The 2011 Texas State University study also concluded with the lines: “However, the group notes that there are some sightings that they could not explain, such as lights that move backward, dance, or disappear suddenly.”

So what might be going on with these lights? Now we come to some sciency nature stuff.

An Interlude on Early Sightings

Before diving into scientific explanations, let’s circle back to the earliest sightings by Western settlers because, while we’re on the subject of people having seen these lights before the invention of cars, how can we be sure they actually did see anything? In other words, are the Marfa Lights just a byproduct of our technologically developing world?

Here’s what we mean. Indigenous tribes in the area reported strange lights, which they linked to falling stars. Were these even what modern viewers call “the Marfa Lights,” or were they a celestial event or something else altogether? We can’t answer this, but we can go into a bit more detail on the 1880s reports.

Everywhere you look, Robert Reed Ellison is held up as the example of the first person to report seeing the lights, even though other people had already seen them, because everyone knew what he was talking about. Remember, a group of people went riding off to investigate what they thought were Apache campfires but found nothing? This could have been anything.

It could easily have been campfires, and the posse was just looking in the wrong place. It could have been a celestial body—again, as even now people don’t always know what they’re looking at in the sky. Ellison didn’t even technically report his sighting as it was never written anywhere, just told to his family, who passed the story down.

It therefore might have changed with time, and there wasn’t exactly a lot of meat on its bones anyway, so relating a story about seeing some far-off lights and wondering if they were campfires doesn’t seem like a strong link to the lights of today at all.

Michael Hall tracked down Rosemary Cox, Ellison’s granddaughter, who still lived in the Marfa area. She had a memoir that Ellison wrote in 1937 at the age of about 70. In it, there is no mention of the strange lights he saw that one time, which might not be terribly surprising, as it wasn’t really that big a deal. When Hall asked Cox if there were any other omissions from the memoir, she said, “his wife and his family.”

Seems like if Ellison just wrote about his cowboy stuff and didn’t even give his own wife and kids a look in, what chance did a few far-off lights have? It was only a few remembered sentences passed along over the years that tie them to this story.

O.W. Williams also allegedly reported the lights, but again, when Michael Hall went looking, he turned up another example of a story that had been passed down a family tree without having ever been officially committed to paper.

The other example from the 1880s you can find is a couple who reported seeing them in 1885. They are variously called Joe and Sally Humphreys or Joe and Anne Humphreys, and the fact that they allegedly saw some lights is the only information you can find, so not very helpful.

There is also an alleged sighting from all the way back in 1617 from a “Captain Manuel Pedro Vasco” who witnessed the lights moving towards him and called them “the lights of God.” Unfortunately, it was impossible to find any more information about this person apart from a few other web pages quoting the same event, so this is another one we’ll have to put down to a historical anecdote.

What this all comes down to is that we don’t know if these supposed early sightings were the same thing that people are seeing now as the “Marfa Lights,” if they were something totally different but explainable such as far-off campfires, or whether they were nothing at all.

The Sciency Nature Stuff Explanations

Could there be a natural explanation for these moving, coloured lights? The phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire has been thrown into the ring, a reliable contender when it comes to weird glowing things that people can’t easily explain. St. Elmo’s fire is an electrical weather phenomenon, most often seen during thunderstorms when electrical discharge gathers around an object or point. To use a quote from electrical engineer William Beaty writing in Scientific American:

St. Elmo’s Fire is a type of continuous electric spark called a ‘glow discharge.’… When it occurs naturally, we call it St. Elmo’s Fire, but when it occurs inside a glass tube, we call it a neon sign.

This could account for people seeing blueish glows in the distance; however, it would not account for the movement of these lights unless they were attached to a physical object. It also wouldn’t account for the differences in colours reported by witnesses, which have spanned the spectrum from yellow to white to red to blue.

Now let’s talk swamp gas or marsh gas. There are some gases that, when they come into contact with oxygen, ignite to create a spooky glow. According to LiveScience.com:

This glowing phenomenon, sometimes called ‘will-o’-the-wisp,’ ‘ignes fatui’ or ‘fool’s fire,’ has been observed around the world, especially in marshy areas where the decay of organic matter can create pockets of phosphine and methane.

This sounds good, but our lights are happening in the middle of a desert, not a nice boggy marshland. The natural conditions could produce similar effects, however, as the article goes on to say: “there are significant reserves of oil, natural gas and other petroleum hydrocarbons in the area, which could include methane in quantities capable of producing an effect similar to that created by swamp gas.”

So that’s a plausible explanation for some of the lights, maybe. There’s also the phenomenon of “fata morgana,” sometimes called “a superior mirage,” where warmer air rests on top of cooler air, distorting our perspective and making things look like they’re floating higher than they really are. The area where the Marfa Lights are found is nearly 1,500 metres above sea level, and in a desert, meaning that there can be a large variation in daily temperatures, which can lead to the different layers of air needed for this effect to occur.

The fata morgana effect could cause the car headlights to look like they’re rising up, or other lights in the distance to look like they’re in a different place to where they should be. As the Marfa Lights are best seen at certain times of day and at certain times of year, it seems to make sense that they’d be most visible when atmospheric conditions are lining up in this way.

There are yet more hypotheses as to what might be causing these lights, though. Let’s go back to James Bunnell, the retired aerospace engineer, because he pops up in a lot of articles about this and is someone who’s really tried to get to the bottom of it in a scientific way. He actually grew up in the area and went to Marfa High School, but didn’t get around to investigating the lights until much later in life, when he went back to his hometown and saw the lights for himself in the year 2000.

We mentioned earlier that he differentiates between what are clearly car headlights and what he believes are the actual Marfa Lights. He set up a rig of infrared and wide-spectrum cameras to record the lights’ activity every night and started studying the data. Twelve years and a few books on, he couldn’t find any discernible pattern in the lights’ behaviour, or concrete evidence for their existence one way or the other.

He’s come up with a few suggestions over the years as to what’s causing the lights, none of them extraterrestrial. One is a sort of plasma rain falling onto the desert. In the Texas Monthly piece by Michael Hall, it says:

He speculates that the lights may result from all the high-energy particles, or plasma, that rain down from the inner Van Allen Radiation Belt; while most are absorbed into the planet, some, he thinks, may be repelled by the layer of volcanic rock in the Mitchell Flat, which behaves like a magnetic shield. This hot, ionized plasma then shoots around, splitting and recombining and glowing like mad. ‘It would be nice to solve the puzzle,’ he said, ‘but it won’t matter if I don’t. I’m confident there’s a natural explanation.’

For what it’s worth, Bunnell’s current pet theory is that underground friction occurring on the igneous rock in the area is producing a form of electricity called a “piezoelectric charge,” which results in the lights people see from across the plain.

Another explanation could be down to the way each person observes light. The way one person’s eye refracts light will be different to someone else, meaning that some people might see things in the desert sky that others don’t.

Michael Hall had another almost close encounter on his 2006 field trip to Marfa. Local woman Linda Armstrong had taken a video of a large, bright light that she said had been visible for three weeks and that “seemed to be in front of the clouds.” Hall camped out in her yard and was woken up at 5:20 am by Armstrong telling him the light was there again. As per his article:

I grabbed my glasses. It was a glowing, bulbous teardrop of light, full of what looked like writhing snakes of fire. It was huge—bigger than any non-lunar thing I’d ever seen in the night sky—and sure enough, it was hovering. (…) In fact, it was Venus, the morning star, startling me and Armstrong the way it had other humans for many other eons. I was crushed.

Poor Michael Hall—he had his dreams crushed left, right, and centre. Linda Armstrong also admitted she must have been wrong about the light being in front of the clouds, just another corrupted memory to add to the pot. Unfortunately, because nobody can tell exactly where the lights are coming from, no one’s been close enough to do any sort of testing. You see repeated requests to fly drones over the area, but drones are one of the suggestions for what the lights are, and it might capture a flash of light but we still wouldn’t know what was making it.

Also, it seems like most people don’t actually want to find out for sure what’s really out there, keeping the mystery alive and, presumably, the tourist cash flowing in. Marfa is no different, with a yearly Marfa Lights Festival that started in 1986. One year’s lineup included a street parade, a pie baking competition, live acts including a DJ Crazy Legs, and—a visit from Carl the Camel.

So What Are the Marfa Lights?

This is an unusual case because the Marfa Lights are still, really, a mystery. While many sightings can be explained by car lights on the highway facing the viewing center, there are other lights that don’t conform to this explanation. Allegedly. There aren’t any decent videos of crazy light shows that people say they’ve witnessed, so it’s hard to know what they’re talking about. Michael Hall in his Texas Monthly piece mentions a family that arrives at the viewing centre, sees a light in the distance, exclaims they’ve seen the Marfa Lights, and then leaves again. Who knows how they told that story to their friends.

Might some people be misremembering their experiences? Yes. Nobody really knows how far away the lights are, therefore you can’t tell what size they are or how fast they’re moving either. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and inflate your memory to match the current stories being told.

Might there be lights other than car lights? Yes, but there are many credible real-world explanations as to what might cause them, any one of which, or a combination of which, would probably explain them. While there is not a single definitive answer as yet, the fact that there are several possibilities means that it’s probably one of them, and not a ghost Apache chief or little green men.

What about the lights that pre-date the highway? Well, we talked about that earlier, and the frequently cited earliest sightings weren’t officially recorded anywhere, just passed down in family stories, so they’re not much more than hearsay at this point.

A plaque at the viewing centre sums the whole thing up nicely:

Many viewers have theories ranging from scientific to science fiction as they describe their ideas of aliens in UFOs, ranch house lights, St. Elmo’s Fire, or headlights from vehicles on US 67, the Presidio Highway. Some believe the lights are an electrostatic discharge, swamp gases, moonlight shining on veins of mica, or ghosts of Conquistadors searching for gold.

An explanation as to why the lights cannot be located is an unusual phenomenon similar to a miracle, where atmospheric conditions produced by the interaction of cold and warm layers of air bend light so that it can be seen from afar, but not up close.

The mystery of these lights still remains unsolved.

Note—they meant “mirage” and not “miracle,” but now it’s on a metal plaque for all time. To some witnesses, though, “miracle” definitely is the right word, and they won’t let anyone tell them different.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Marfa Ghost Lights?

The Marfa Ghost Lights are strange dancing orbs in the sky that can sometimes be seen across the desert vista just before the sun rises or just after it sets near Marfa, Texas.

When were the Marfa Ghost Lights first documented?

The Marfa Ghost Lights were first documented around 145 years ago.

What are some of the otherworldly explanations for the Marfa Ghost Lights?

Some otherworldly explanations include lanterns held by the ghosts of Spanish Conquistadors, the souls of deceased native American chiefs, and even aliens. However, these are largely considered folklore.

What is one of the more rational explanations for the Marfa Ghost Lights?

One of the more rational explanations is that the lights are car headlights from US Highway 67, which appear distorted due to atmospheric conditions.

What is St. Elmo’s fire and how might it relate to the Marfa Ghost Lights?

St. Elmo’s fire is an electrical weather phenomenon that can create a blueish glow. While it could account for some blueish glows seen in the distance, it would not explain the movement or color variations of the Marfa Ghost Lights.

What is the Marfa Lights Viewing Center?

The Marfa Lights Viewing Center is a structure on US Highway 90, about 9 miles out of Marfa, where people can set up camp to watch the lights. It has free telescopes and toilets.

What is the Marfa Lights Festival?

The Marfa Lights Festival is an annual event that started in 1986. It includes a street parade, a pie baking competition, live acts, and other attractions.

What did the Texas State University study conclude about the Marfa Ghost Lights?

The Texas State University study concluded that most of the lights seen from the viewing area are car headlights from the highway, distorted by atmospheric conditions. However, they noted some sightings that they could not explain, such as lights that move backward, dance, or disappear suddenly.

What is the plaque at the Marfa Lights Viewing Center?

The plaque at the Marfa Lights Viewing Center lists various theories about the lights, ranging from scientific explanations like electrostatic discharge and swamp gases to more fantastical ideas like aliens and ghosts. It also mentions an atmospheric phenomenon that bends light, making it visible from afar but not up close.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Unexplained Texas Ghost Lights
• Hero image source by ZLEA / openverse, by-sa.