Mysterious Texas Lights Draw a Crowd

[greatdarkwing]

Mysterious Texas Lights Draw a Crowd
By MICHAEL GRACZYK, AP

MARFA, Texas (AP) - Nevada has Area 51. New Mexico has Roswell. Texas has the Marfa Lights.

Whatever's out there sparkling or dancing across Mitchell Flat and toward the Chinati Mountains has both befuddled people and attracted them to this remote area east of Marfa for well over a century.

They start converging about dusk on a desolate spot in the West Texas desert with a ridge view and an expanse of some 20 miles of treeless rangeland.

A few bring lawn chairs. Some find a spot on concrete picnic tables. Others lean against a brick wall.

With darkness toward to the east and the remnants of a spectacular sunset to the west, the first cries erupt.

"Look! Look!"

Fingers point. Binoculars get fine tuned. A few cameras click. All the attention focuses on specks of brilliance.

Legend. Myth. Natural phenomenon. UFOs?

"I just want to see for myself, and say I saw them," James Teems, 61, from Hobbs, N.M., said on a recent night.

"I thought we'd come over and look," said his wife, Fern, 59. "Looks like campfires."

That was the description back in the 1800s when cowboys and pioneers first noticed the lights. According to numerous accounts, they speculated they were camp fires or signal fires from Apaches who roamed the wilderness area around Texas' Big Bend. But, as the legend has it, when folks went over for a closer inspection, they found no sign of fires.

And still haven't.

"I'm having a hard time believing no one knows what it is," said Mike Thompson, who with his wife and two daughters made the stop as part of a trip to the region from their home about 300 miles away in San Angelo. "We've heard about this for a long time. We're here to see if we can see anything."

The lights on a recent pair of June evenings appeared to float above the horizon, dip and occasionally flare. At times, there were two or three simultaneously. They generally moved left to right, up and down. Then there were periods of no lights.

"It looks like car lights," one woman said.

Could be.

Highway U.S. 67, the main route between Marfa and Presidio, winds and seesaws 60 miles to the south on the Texas-Mexico border. A car's headlights easily could be detected in the darkness from miles away.

But the lights were here before cars and even before electricity reached the region.

There are numerous theories on what causes the phenomenon. Moonlight on mica veins sparkling off the mountains. Swamp gas. Static electricity. Atmospheric conditions created by warm and cold layers of air bending light rays that only can be seen from afar.

Then there are the ghosts of the Conquistadores looking for gold, or the old Apache explanation of stars dropping to Earth.

"I have seen strange lights that moved oddly and were definitely not on the ground," said Bernie Zelazney, with the Big Bend Astronomical Society.

Some years ago he saw lights that were "bright bluish and red colors and would come together, then one would go away."

"It was unusual," he said.

Zelazney said one explanation he leans toward is called the piezoelectric effect, where voltage is created between moving solid surfaces - in this case, rock containing quartz that contracts and expands as the surface heats and cools.

"There's a lot of quartz in the mountains out there," he said.

The effect was discovered by Pierre Curie in 1883, coincidentally the same year rancher Robert Reed Ellison is credited with the first disclosure of the Marfa Lights.

Joe Duncan, 46, owner of the Paisano Hotel, estimates a third of his customers come to see the Marfa Lights, which are celebrated with a festival each summer. He subscribes to the car-lights-on-the-highway theory.

Sort of.

"It's a hilly road, so it comes and goes and they see that," Duncan said. "But there have been too many people that are too intelligent that say there is something out there, and that if it was just the car lights somebody would have figured it out. They were definitely here before headlights.

"Static electricity," he adds. "That's what old timers here have told me."

Other local folks have stories of lights following them or bearing down on them as they travel lonely U.S. 90 between Alpine and Marfa. About a 10-minute drive east of town, the Texas Department of Transportation has erected a roadside rest stop that serves as the "Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Area," according to the road sign.

It's where the nightly gathering of the curious assembles, with everything from motorcycles to tractor-trailer rigs filling the free parking area.

"I'd heard about it for years," said Jack Phillips, 52, who was touring the area by motorcycle with his wife and stopped for the show. "You can't beat the price."

"I think it's somebody on the hill," Christi Collier, 54, of Austin, offered while gazing at the lights. "It's a big campfire."

"I don't understand," said her companion, Lane Howard, 49. "They can tell us what happened on the moon a million years ago but they can't explain this?"

[ryan8472]

Awesome. I love **** like that, even if it is fake. It's so cool.

[irishgrl]

another article
The AFU and Urban Legend Archive

I just love synchronisity -- just last night I opened my new copy of "Texas Highways" magazine and, lo, there was an article about the Marfa Lights. So here, for your reading pleasure, is the complete article (112 lines) -- reprinted without permission, and wasting hundreds, perhaps even thousands of dollars...

The article even included a map of where to find the lights and a photo taken of the lights:

"The Marfa Lights - A Mystery" --- By Rosemary Williams

The fables Marfa Lights. They pulsate. They dance. They flicker. Sometimes they flash colors. Sometimes they display the bright intensity of a strobe. Always, they fascinate.

Thousands have seen them. Thousands have speculated about them. Thousands will continue to enjoy their serendipity.

Drive nine miles east from Marfa any night to the turnout viewing site that edges the old Marfa Army Air Field, and, usually, you will see a dozen or so hopeful light-sighters. They sit on car hoods. They wait by the fence. They talk quietly in the charged West Texas darkness. Sometimes, they wait in vain. For the mysterious ghost lights march to their own drummer. The lights appear at random, during all kinds of weather, at no particular time, during no particular season.

When did this spectral phenomenon begin? No one really knows, although the first reported sightings occurred in the 1800s. What are the Marfa Lights? No one really knows that, either, but folks sure have spent lots of time trying to figure them out, identifying them as anything from phosphorescent jackrabbits to atmospheric phenomena. Undoubtedly, some of the lights that people spot are the distant headlights of vehicles traveling down US 67 in the distance. Some of them--but not all.

The ghost lights have entranced area settlers and visitors for more than a century and have eluded precise scientific examination and explanation for at least half that long. Some viewers claim to have seem them up close, describing them as one or two (occasionally more) red or yellow or bluish lights about the size of basketballs, or one colored basketball-sized light, or as a single, startlingly bright light. But most people ivew them from afar, the way Hallie Stillwell has done for more than 75 years.

"Well, I first saw the Marfa Lights in 1916, when I was teaching school in Presidio," says Hallie, who has lived in the Big Bend country for most of her 95 years. "Every time I'd go home to Alpine, I'd have to wait until school was out, and it would be nighttime when I would pass by the Chinati Mtns. That's where the 'mystery lights' would appear," she says.

"Back then, we would wonder about the lights, but we didn't know they were going to be famous one of these days! From Marfa to Alpine, we'd really get a good look at them. They'd flare up and be kind of red, then they'd die down, then they'd move elsewhere and flicker a little bit. They're really weird. There are also lights around the Cienega Mountains. No one talks about those. Folks are always just intereted in the lights in the Chinatis.

"I know of some people who saw them 100 years ago," says Hallie. "So, I have an idea that the early Indians in this country and everyone else who came through saw those lights. I know for certain the lights I saw then weren't auto headlights. You know, there weren't too many automobiles going up and down the road in 1916! I don't know what the lights are and I don't really want to know," she says.

But there are some whose natural curiosity prickles and prods them to seek an explanation. For them, the search for the source of the Marfa Lights can prove a lifelong quest. Such as seeker is Kirby Warnock, whose family settled in the Trans-Pecos region just north of Big Bend country more than 100 years ago.

"My late father, Dr. Frank Warnock, took me and my brother, Miles to see the lights for the first time in 1963, when I was 11 and my brother was eight," says Kirby, who lives in Dallas. "The lights fascinated me. But when I asked my father, 'What are they, Dad?' he simply responded, 'We don't know.' Well, I wasn't satisfied with that, so I determined to find out," Kirby says.

"Every summer, when I visited my grandfather in Fort Stockton, I drove out to see the lights. I took pictures of them. I talked to everyone I could about them. Over the years, two of those folks, Fritz Kahl and the late Pat Kenney, spent hours talking with me about the Marfa Lights," he says.

"Fritz, a pilot, ran the airport at Marfa, and Pat was a geologist. Fritz told me a lot about earlier sightings of the lights--he had even searched for them from the air--while Pat helped me try to pinpoint them, so I could examine them up close.

"In the late Seventies, a corporation became convinced that vast uranium deposits existed in the area," says Kirby. "They paid Pat Kenney to live out there and investigate further. Well, Pat had all kinds of surveying equipment, and he and I located a stretch of land where it was impossible for car lights to interfere. When the ghost lights appeared, we triangulated them.

"My brother and I tried to get close but never could," Kirby says. "The lights always seemd to move away, out of our reach. Once, Pat saw them fairly close, within 25 yards or so, but Miles and I never did. By the way, Pat never found uranium deposits, either.

"Finally, after some 15 years of studying the lights and searching for their source, I kind of adopted the local 'let 'em be' philosophy, and quit looking so hard," he says.

But Kirby just couldn't let go altogether. He wrote an article about the Marfa Lights for the Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine, "Spirit", in April 1982, which he later reprinted in 1988 in the first issue of his publication "Big Bend Quarterly". A research assistant for the NBC television program "Unsolved Mysteries" picked up on the story, and the producers eventually contacted Kirby for his help in televising a segment about the lights. Kirby appeared in the show and served as a technical advisor as well. The program, which aired in 1991, also included appears by Fritz Kahl and Hallie Stillwell.
"I still don't know precisely what the lights are, but I do have theory," says Kirby. "I believe the Marfa Lights are some type of natural phenomenon, just as St. Elmo's fire is a natural phenomenon. The real mystery about the Marfa Lights is that they occur so often. The Big Bend country harbors lots of mysteries, and these lights are just one of them," he says.
Scientific theories about the lights exist, of course. Once concept describes the lights as an atmospheric phenomenon that resembles a mirage, wherein, under certain atmospheric conditions, headlight beams or even the lights from stars just over the horizon bend back toward earth and appear to move around and change. Such explanations don't excite old-timers like Hallie Stillwell.

"The Marfa Lights are a mystery," says Hallie. "Let 'em stay a mystery."

So be it.

Janet "at least they didn't claim it was swamp gas." Christian

--

Janet Christian [email protected]

My boss agrees with everything I say - well, actually, he thinks I'm working. "Never argue with a Scorpio - it's frustrating and you'll lose, anyway..."


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[estranged4life]

phenomena that is found near Burns Flats here in Oklahoma, Where nightly you can see some type of objects that seem to hover in the sky...But no one, not even the military, will give an answer on what exactly it is that people see nightly.


Kinda ironic that Burns Flats was once an Air Force installation, And will now be a space port for future travels into outer space (The long runway at Burns Flats is designated as an emergency landing for the Space Shuttle fleet.)

[irishgrl]

Originally Posted by estranged4life

phenomena that is found near Burns Flats here in Oklahoma, Where nightly you can see some type of objects that seem to hover in the sky...But no one, not even the military, will give an answer on what exactly it is that people see nightly.


Kinda ironic that Burns Flats was once an Air Force installation, And will now be a space port for future travels into outer space (The long runway at Burns Flats is desinated as an emergency landing for the Space Shuttles.)

file that under: Things that make you go HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

[darklinensuit]

I read this story last week and did think hmmmm.

I always thought crop circles would be intersting to visit.

- Jake