The Truth Is Out There
Forget what the believers and the skeptics say. Forget what you’ve seen, or think you’ve seen, with your own eyes. There’s no way to know if the Marfa lights are real—and that’s what’s so great about them.
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They left, and I was alone again. The sky was dark now, and I could see a pattern: Each light came on brightly just above and to the left of a red light on a radio tower, at “eleven o’clock,” as my Army father would say. Each would move slowly to the right (without my binoculars, they appeared stationary), twinkle, dim, go out, and eight seconds later come back on, until it was straight above the red light, when it would go out again and come back on fifteen seconds later at about two o’clock. And so on. Just before the light got to my trusty yucca plant, it dimmed and disappeared, then reappeared much brighter than before. 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.
This was a problem. Did I really remember them jumping up and down, going left and right, changing colors? Did I really remember them dancing? Yes, I did. People remember what they want to remember, just as they see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. And who doesn’t want to believe in magic?
A man, a woman, and a girl about eight years old arrived, and the girl ran up to the wall just as a bright light came on. “Ooh!” they all said. “Ooh!”
“Bright!” she exclaimed. “Look how bright!”
A second came on. “There!” she called. “Ooh! I really think that’s a Marfa light!”
A train rumbled by on the tracks just north of U.S. 90 and blew its horn. The family walked briskly back to their car, and the girl called out, “I’ve seen the Marfa lights!”
OKAY, HATS OFF TO SCIENCE. And common sense. Plus really good binoculars (the laser and the lights stayed in my motel room). But there were no cars in far West Texas in 1883, so first thing next morning, I called on Rosemary Cox, a granddaughter of Robert Ellison, the sixteen-year-old cowboy who had reported seeing the lights 123 years ago. Cox lives at the northern edge of town and taught at the elementary and junior high schools for 30 years before retiring, in 1992. She’s not a fan of the new Marfa (“They’ve priced the common folks out of homes”); the old one is much more majestic.
She carefully laid out her past in front of me on her couch: a copy of her grandfather’s obituary, a picture of him and his bride, a long poem he had written about his life. The thing I really wanted to see, though, was Ellison’s memoir, which he had written in 1937. I knew that he had reported bringing three thousand cattle through the Paisano Pass with a small crew, but I had read conflicting accounts on whether he’d written anything about the lights. If he’d seen something strange, I thought, surely he would have. I had talked with Cox on the phone, and she’d told me I was welcome to come see the manuscript.
But when I arrived, she said, “I’ve been through this twice and couldn’t find anything about the lights. I kept thinking I’d find a sentence or something about it.” I was disappointed, but I read aloud some of the document anyway. The only reference I found to seeing something bright was a memory of how on the first night, camped at Paisano Pass, one of Ellison’s men “noticed something shining in the grass and kicked it up and found he had a human skull.”
“Rough country,” said Cox.
Ultimately, her grandfather became the original historical source for the Marfa lights because he had told stories about them to his family. Cox recalled, “What I remember is there were lights down there they couldn’t explain. They thought they were Indian fires. They were just there all the time, part of the country. At least that’s what I remember him saying.” I asked her if there were other things her grandfather didn’t write about in his memoir. “His wife and his family,” she said. “This was just a cowboy’s story. All in the world it was.”
If Cox’s grandfather didn’t actually write about the lights, the state of Texas said that Clayton Williams’s grandfather did, so I called the ex-politician to ask about it. He explained that O. W. Williams was a former lawyer who had become a surveyor in the Terlingua area in the 1880’s. “He had a Mexican guide named Juan Cano,” said Williams, who donated ten acres of land for the viewing center, “and he told my grandfather stories by the campfire that the Indians had told the Mexicans, including one about the Marfa lights. The Indians called them Alsate’s Ghost, for the Apache chief who had been killed by the Mexicans. My grandfather wrote a lot of stories—Indian stories as told to Mexicans, who told my grandfather. He saw the lights too, but I don’t think he ever wrote down his observations. But he told me about seeing them.”
So Williams didn’t exactly “write” about the lights and Ellison only “reported” them to members of his family. But that, insist their grandchildren, doesn’t mean the lights don’t exist. In fact, both Williams and Cox—along with almost everyone else out there in far West Texas—say they’ve been seeing mysterious lights near Marfa for as long as they can remember. Cox is kind of blasé about the whole thing; Williams, who lives in Midland now but still runs cattle on his Loma Vista ranch, near Paisano Pass, is anything but. “They’re blue-white,” he said excitedly. “They go straight up, hover, straight down. Different people see ’em different. I’ve always seen them looking west, toward the Chinatis.” But, I asked him, don’t most of those lights come from cars? “Correct.” And these are in the same area? “Yes. Right above the car lights. How do I differentiate between a car light and a Marfa light? Even an Aggie can tell that when the light goes straight up, that’s a Marfa light.”
It took me ten years, but I was finally let in on the little secret shared by locals and old-timers: There are two kinds of Marfa lights, the real ones and, well, the phony ones, the ones you see from the viewing center. “It’s good for tourists,” said rancher Kerr Mitchell about the setup, “but you’re telling them something that is completely and totally incorrect. That’s not right.” Kerr, who lives on the southern end of the Mitchell Flat, which was named for his family, has seen the real Marfa lights only twice, and that was enough for him. “The first night, I was outside and saw this light, and it was just indescribable—this massive, enormous white light. I thought I was dreaming. The second time, there were five or six in a series, headed south at a pretty good clip, not very high up. They gradually disappeared. You see some strange things out here, but what I saw made me a believer.”
Over my two days in Marfa—and then in the weeks afterward—many people told me their own personal Marfa lights stories. Some, truth be told, were kind of dull, at least in the context of others, which were absolutely nutty. But one thing is clear: Something is out there. And it ain’t coming from the headlights of a Mazda pickup.
YOU’D THINK, THOUGH, that if almost everyone who’s been out there has seen the real Marfa lights, someone would have written about them, say, 100, or even 75 years ago. But the earliest known story is a San Angelo Times piece from February 1945 titled “Ghost Light Appears in Marfa Area,” and the earliest written report I found at the Marfa Public Library, where I went after talking to Cox, was a short 1957 Coronet magazine piece. “A mysterious light gleams out of the night like a weird Cyclopean eye,” wrote the author. The library has a thick notebook full of stories, high school and college term papers, and eyewitness reports about the lights. You won’t see much original research: Most accounts merely repeat folklore, such as tales about Ellison or the one about the man saved by a light in a blizzard (it led him to a cave) or the one about James Dean (who was so fascinated by them during the filming of Giant that he kept a telescope handy). But you will see how the Marfa lights have evolved as a phenomenon. Usually, the early tales refer to a single light—the Ghost Light or Smuggler’s Light or Alsate’s Light—and old-timers quoted in stories talk about it as being unremarkable. In modern times, though, there were numerous lights, and they moved really fast. They were balls of fire. They were life altering.
My Library
