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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In the early eighties, poets praised the lights; “People lean out of themselves,” wrote Naomi Shihab Nye, “to find this impossible thing.” The lights became, in a word, stars, with stories in the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Post, and the Wall Street Journal and support from the Marfa Chamber of Commerce, which began trumpeting them after much pestering from Mando’s Garage owner Armando Vasquez. “I started promoting them back in the seventies, taking people from the motels to see them,” he told me. “I saw it could help our economy.” In 1986 the original roadside viewing area was built, and the city held its first Marfa Lights Festival. Busloads of tourists began stopping by the side of U.S. 90 and scanning the horizon. Longtime resident Fritz Kahl had some keen advice for them: “I still say the best way to see the lights is with a six-pack of beer and a good-looking woman.”
The locals have no choice but to maintain a sense of resigned good humor about the mystery lights. Indeed, most of them take the lights for granted. Like their forefathers, residents see them as just part of a landscape that includes, for example, the majestic Cathedral Mountain jutting dramatically out of the high desert. As Cox had told me, they’re just there. You want mysterious? How about a New York Minimalist artist, Donald Judd, moving to town 34 years ago, buying up the downtown, and eventually bringing in thousands of arty weirdos? How about run-down adobe homes selling for a quarter of a million dollars? How about Dan Rather flipping the switch and turning on a public radio station in the middle of far West Texas?
But lights rushing around in the desert? Not so much.
ON MY SECOND NIGHT I RETURNED to the viewing center, set up my binoculars, and saw the same thing: the road, the first lights at dusk, more as it got darker, then finally the repeating pattern from the left to the right along a long, unseen line. I drove out onto Nopal Road, which snakes down through the Mitchell Flat, ground zero for many close encounters. The road is packed dirt and rock, and on either side are the scrub and cacti of the ranches. I drove past the first cattle guard and up a slight rise in the road and parked about a mile and a half in. I shut off the car. It was in this spot one night in 1973 that geologists Pat Kenney and Elwood Wright saw two cantaloupe-size balls of light come barreling out of the southwest toward them at about 200 miles per hour. The first sped off toward the abandoned Marfa air base, while the second slowed down and then hovered two hundred feet away. They wrote later that the light seemed to be “daring them to chase it … It seemed to possess intelligence!”
A little farther down the road is where Alton Sutter, a minister from Monahans, had one of the more fantastic experiences I’ve heard. It was 1994, and he, along with his wife, two sons, and another minister, had driven out to see the lights. It was cold, and they waited about half an hour. “Finally,” he told me, “we saw one coming toward us, then a bunch of them, all small. If you ever saw The Wizard of Oz, the bubble the Good Witch arrives in, that’s what they looked like—fluorescent balloons floating, going all around us. One actually landed on the ground. I went over, and I took my glove off, reached down with my index finger, and picked it up; it was the size of the head of a pin. It went out, and I joked, ‘Okay, I’m not going to prison for killing this Marfa light. It died on its own.’”
The story was pretty fabulous, but when I told it to Cox, she dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “I don’t any more believe that than nothing,” she said. But he’s a preacher, I protested. “I don’t care. Don’t believe those stories about lights chasing people. ’Tain’t so.”
But out here on Nopal Road, miles from nowhere, it was hard not to think about such things. I looked southeast. Nothing. The stars crept slowly overhead. I looked to the Chinatis and saw the car lights blinking and going out. I didn’t have the same reference points I had had at the viewing center, so I tried to look at the strange lights winking and pulsing in the dark without any preconceived notions or patterns. It worked. The lights seemed to be playing with one another, turning on and off at will. They seemed capricious, magical.
For a few moments. So I counted jackrabbits. I listened to the wind and the sound of the trucks on U.S. 90. I called my wife on the cell phone. After an hour out there, I gave up and slowly began driving back. As I did, I realized my car lights were probably being seen by tourists at the viewing center—and probably appeared strange as hell. I flicked them off and back on. Then I did it again. It wouldn’t be me, but somebody was seeing a mystery light tonight.
ODDLY, YOU WON’T FIND MUCH information about the Marfa lights at the Marfa Chamber of Commerce, whose office is in the old Hotel Paisano, just down the hall from a room packed with Giant memorabilia. There are maps, brochures, and dozens of T-shirts for sale, most of which are from last year’s Marfa Lights Festival and show a boy’s face on top of a mountain, with the words “I’ve seen the Marfa Lights and they’ve seen me.” The office also hands out a sheet of information called “The Unsolved Mystery of the Marfa Ghost Lights.” “The lights appear almost every night,” it reads, and ends telling visitors to park at the visitors center and “scan the southwestern horizon, looking toward Chinati Peak.” I wanted to ask the chamber how it could print such disingenuous stuff, but the truth is, I couldn’t really blame the city elders. Something was out there; it just wasn’t as simple as they made it seem. They’d come to believe the hype to the point that it had become the truth, when the real truth—the real Marfa lights—was so much more interesting than the hype.
In fact, the best place to learn about the Marfa lights is the Apache Trading Post, in Alpine, which is owned by Charlotte and Richard Allen. Out front is Jack-Assic Park, home to four donkeys, and inside are Indian blankets, Western jewelry, hundreds of maps and books on the Big Bend area, and, of course, photos, T-shirts, and postcards of the Marfa lights. In the back room sit chairs in a semicircle around a television. Here, Charlotte shows Marfa lights videos and DVDs. Some days, she gets overwhelmed by people asking about the lights. “Twelve times a day people show up,” she told me. “They want to hear the story from someone. I say, ‘Here’s the DVD and the book,’ but they want to hear it. They want to drive up, know exactly what time, see them, leave, and tell their children, ‘We saw the Marfa lights.’ I say that can’t be done.”
Charlotte met her first Marfa light purely by accident. It happened fifteen years ago, when she was in a car near Nopal Road. “I looked up about two hundred feet in the sky, and there were five lights hovering over us, almost like they were floating. I don’t know how big they were; they were like very close stars. After a few seconds, they went out one by one, systematically, and this shaft of energy was left. It was illuminated particles, if you will, coming down from where the bright lights were. I was awestruck.”
She played me a couple of the videos she shows tourists, one of which, Sightings, includes an interview with the leader of a team of Japanese scientists who came to Marfa in 1989. I knew something about them, because I had sat through a two-part video on the expedition, in Japanese, at the library the day before. That video, which may or may not have been called The Chase, followed (to music that sounded like the theme from the seventies detective show Mannix) three men as they talked on walkie-talkies, slept in an RV out on the Mitchell Flat, stared into little blue screens, blew up some ice, released some balloons, brought in a Buddhist priest, and waited. And waited. For a week they sat out there and didn’t see anything. In Sightings, at one point, the head scientist says, in halting English, that he thinks the lights are a natural phenomenon.
Charlotte met the Japanese researchers, and she has become a kind of hub for other seekers, men such as Edson Hendricks, an electrical engineer and MIT graduate who witnessed an hour-long lights show at the viewing area in 1991—bright yellow lights stopping, reversing direction, getting brighter, splitting in two, dividing and changing direction, speeding up, fading, and finally disappearing. Hendricks, who lives in San Diego, began making frequent trips to the area, bringing along electromagnetic radiation detectors. He also met other aficionados, like fellow MIT grad Bob Creasy and physicist Irwin Wieder. They came, they measured, they returned. “It’s like a think tank here,” said Charlotte. “All these brilliant, brilliant people coming together, sharing stories. We go in the back room and hang. People need that.”
My Library
