The Marfa Lights appear almost every clear night between Marfa and Paisano Pass in Texas.
These mystery yellow, white and even sometimes colored lights move through the air with no real pattern, but disappear when approached closely, making scientific observation difficult. Magic!
Mystery Marfa lights suddenly appear in northeastern Presidio County just in the desert facing the Chinati Mountains, West Texas. The lights – often yellow or white have attributed to paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, UFOs, or will-o’-the-wisp.
First reports
The first historical record of them recalls that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians.
He was told by other settlers that they often saw the Marfa lights, but when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite. Joe and Sally Humphreys, also early settlers, reported their first sighting of the lights in 1885. Cowboys herding cattle on the prairies noticed the lights and in the summer of 1919 rode over the mountains looking for the source, but found nothing.
World War I observers feared that the lights were intended to guide an invasion. During World War II pilots training at the nearby Midland Army Air Field outside Marfa looked for the source of the elusive lights from the air, again with no success.
Skeptics have made the claim that the ghost lights are nothing but the distant headlights of cars passing on a highway far off on the horizon, yet they offer no explanation for the sightings and stories passed down by the Apache who contended that the lights are the spirit of one of their chiefs.
They also fail to take into account the sightings by cowboys and soldiers documented before the distant highway was built.
The following video was filmed on October 1, 2003 on the side of a bluff 1.5 miles outside the Marfa, TX city limits. The train and car noise sounds you hear were BEHIND the camera:
This is NO car lights… At least not car lights from this planet! Lights move about, split apart, melt together, disappeared, and reappeared. Incredible!
The Marfa Lights have been seen since 1883, so car lights alone can’t account for the phenomenon. Cars weren’t around in 1883.
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[…] Photo by Strange Sounds / CC.BY-SA 3.0 […]
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Nice headlights