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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During my visit to the trading post, Joaquin Jackson, the legendary retired Texas Ranger, walked in. He’s seventy but looks years younger in his blue jeans, cowboy boots, and white jacket. He has lived in Alpine since 1987 and has driven the road between it and Marfa hundreds of times, and I asked him if he had a Marfa lights story. Of course he did.
“Most of the time,” he said, “what you see are lights from cars on the Presidio Highway. But one morning, I was headed to Marfa about five, five-thirty, and in the Flat, out near the lookout, I seen these lights come on. There were three, to the south, maybe a mile away, and they’d get real bright, then get dim, but before they went out, shooo! They’d shoot out across the horizon to the right in the blink of an eye. They were at different altitudes—up high and close to the ground—and that happened three or four times. Shooo! It damn sure wasn’t headlights. That’s the only time I saw something. I know one damn thing: It’s weird.”
SO WHAT DO ALL THESE RESEARCHERS and eccentrics think the lights—the real lights—are? Theories range from the logical (planes, helicopters, and off-road vehicles dealing with drug and illegal-immigrant traffic) to the stupid (the rain making bat guano glow). Some have speculated that the lights are natural gas; bubbles might explain Sutter’s vision. Maybe they’re mirages: The whole Mitchell Flat is a basin between mountains, hot in the day and cool at night. The different layers of air, some denser than others, bend light in strange ways. Many go for electrical explanations, such as St. Elmo’s Fire, the little flecks of lightning that sometimes pass between a steer’s horns during storms, but that only lasts for a few seconds. Then there’s piezoelectricity, or the electrical charges that result from earthquakes, but there hasn’t been one in the area since 1995. And, of course, there are the stars and planets. “Venus puts on a great show some mornings,” said Hendricks, who hypothesizes that ultimately the lights are related to electromagnetic currents that run through the planet’s upper layers.
Some of the best and most thorough research being done lately has come from James Bunnell, a retired aerospace engineer who had a vivid sighting in 2000 of lights glowing in the brush that changed his life. He began returning to Marfa with wide-spectrum and infrared cameras and had more sightings. He set up two cameras on nearby ranches that would take photos when he wasn’t there—one a black and white video camera and the other a camera that would take an image every few seconds—and aimed them away from the Chinatis and U.S. 67. The results were pictures of lights shooting into the sky and across the horizon. “To see the real Marfa lights,” he said, “you have to be really lucky. They show infrequently, less than thirty times a year. The best way to see them is to look to the south or southeast, to the right of Goat Mountain. The best time is early in the evening, right after sunset, and early in the morning, right before dawn.”
Bunnell wrote a book, Night Orbs, and produced a DVD, Marfa Lights, both within the past two and a half years. 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.”
Others in the area aren’t so calmly logical. “No,” Williams said firmly when I asked if he had any theories. “They’re not explainable.” Local writer and historian Cecilia Thompson had a similar response. “There will always be people who just absolutely refuse to accept the fact that they can’t explain something,” she said. “I hope there’s never any explanation.”
HERE IS WHAT A SMALL TOWN MARFA IS: On my second night I had gone to the DQ and, while waiting for my chicken sandwich, asked the manager about the sign on the counter that read “Marfa Lights Explained: Book on Sale, $22.” The book turned out to be Bunnell’s, and the manager turned out to be the brother of the man who had gone on trial for wiretapping that morning, represented by Dick DeGuerin (he would be found not guilty). Then the manager told me how his son’s Boy Scout troop had seen a video of a Marfa light shot by the mother of another Scout. Her name was Linda Armstrong, and she and her husband owned a vineyard east of town. This sounded promising, so I called the next morning, and she invited me to see the video. I drove out to their land, which sits on a large hill above the Mitchell Flat. The video showed a big, round white light that seemed to be bobbing, though Armstrong had been walking around as she took the video. She said that she had seen it out her window every morning for three weeks. At first she thought it was a star, but on a recent cloudy morning, it seemed to be in front of the clouds. It hovered. On their perch up high, she said, she had seen lights on two previous occasions. “They accelerate,” she said, “like pressing the gas pedal of a car—whoosh!—then they kind of float back to the same spot.” She invited me to come by at five o’clock the following morning to see it, but I thought, since she lived above the whole Bermuda Triangle of Marfa and the Flat, maybe I could just sleep out under the stars and get a firsthand look. I would be driving home later, and this would be my last chance to see a Marfa light.
I watched the moon rise at about nine-thirty, just over Cathedral Mountain. It was huge and as yellow as a sunflower. Standing there on top of West Texas, I could see the silhouette of Goat Mountain to the east, the lights of Marfa to the west, the car lights of U.S. 90 to the north, and the car lights of U.S. 67 to the south. I had borrowed a sleeping bag and blankets, and after Armstrong parked her truck so that the bed was facing the east, where the light had appeared, I crawled in. I had binoculars, camera, and tape recorder ready.
As usual, there wasn’t much going on out in the Mitchell Flat, aside from coyotes and jackrabbits. But there was a faint reddish light to the left of the radio tower light, which was strange. And looking at the Chinatis, I saw a light above the imaginary line I’d burned into my brain. That was weird too. Then another light showed up above the line. They both looked like car lights, but then the second one began moving—to the left. I swore I could see a glow in the desert around it. And then the two seemed to come together. What the hell had just happened? This didn’t fit my pattern at all. Of course, maybe it was some jerk horsing around on a ranch road.
I had visions of waking up to a Marfa light hovering over me and could barely sleep: dozing off, waking, peering over the sides of the truck, and lying down again. The reddish light stayed where it was all night, and more lights appeared above the U.S. 67 lights. Jackrabbits hopped and stars revolved overhead.
“Mike! Wake up! There it is!” At five-twenty Armstrong came running out of her trailer, yelling and banging on the side of the truck. I woke up to see a large, superbright yellow light, straight out over the Flat. 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. It was farther away than I had hoped it would be, far out on the plain, in the eastern sky, north of Cathedral Mountain. In fact, it seemed to be on the horizon. In fact, it was rising in the sky near where the moon, so exaggerated in size and color, had also appeared.
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. So was Armstrong, who, in the cold February mornings, hadn’t actually come out this far to investigate. “I swore it was in front of the clouds,” she said when we realized what we were looking at. She had a good sense of humor about it. “I’m like, ‘Oh, well. Not impressed.’ I’m not one of those people who believe in UFOs, and I’m not one of those people obsessed with the lights.”
On my way out of town, heading home, I stopped by the viewing center one more time. There was a camper parked out front but no one at the binoculars. It was six-thirty, and on the southwestern horizon I could see the car lights of people driving to work from Presidio. I drove east, toward Venus, which by now was higher in the sky and looked like any other large celestial body. I thought how much I’d really wanted a Marfa lights story of my own. You may have to wait a long time and sit through many eventless nights. Indeed, you might spend your whole life waiting for a Marfa light.
Next time, I’ll bring a six-pack of beer and a good-looking woman. My wife has never seen a real Marfa light either.
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