Marfa Lights Explained 183
billsoxs writes "The Marfa lights are ghostly lights that have been observed for years around Marfa TX (near Big Bend). They have been the subject of curiosity , a source of tourism and scientifically studied a number of times. Now a group of physics students from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) have use small lasers and traffic sensors to show that these lights are most likely headlights from cars on a distant highway. The publication is in the Society of Physics Students website. The PDF of the article is here. (Unfortunately the related video is no longer available on the web but more stuff is here.)"
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Science! (Score:5, Informative)
All you need is some clever dudes, equipment, and the will to find something out.
Not that clever, if they're attributing this to automotive traffic. There were only a handful of automobiles (all of them "experimental") on the North American continent when the first documented reports emerged (1880s). In effect, they're doing exactly what you blame others for doing: they don't understand what has been causing the lights over the last 120 years, so they pull a scientific possibility out of the hat and give it a go. According to the article, they've been able to create light appearances observable at the same locations as the Marfa lights have been observed by having a vehicle on the highway flashing its lights on and off. This presents the possibility that many of the so called sightings were of cars traveling on the highway. Unfortunately for them, the highway has only been around since 1930... *cue xfiles theme* (not to mention the Marfa lights are often described as being highly distorted, and not always as clear as those observed by the students).
The students did a great job of presenting a possible explanation, but it should be noted that they have not proven / solved anything. Even in their writeup it's mentioned that they were unable to find any historical accounts to compare their findings with. At which point Robert Ellison (first documented sighter) rolled over in his grave and coughed.
Re:BREAKING NEWS! (Score:0, Informative)
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2005/07/gi
http://www.rense.com/general45/excel.htm [rense.com]
http://taskboy.com/lectures/UFOlogy/02_Pre-1946/s
Also am I the only one who read the pdf? I didn't see anything about any lasers. All they did was pure statistics; # of lights appeared at given time vs # of cars that drove on the 67th highway. This could be pure coninsidence.
Not Very Comprehensive; Duplicate Study (Score:5, Informative)
However, their study does not resolve or even address one problem with this conclusion - the lights have been visible long before cars were common, or even available, in the area. Furthermore, the students documented the lights were car headlights from US Highway 67 - however, Highway 67's west end was in Dallas when the highway was originally built; Highway 67 did not extend into west Texas and the Marfa area until 1930 [wikipedia.org].
The best part is, this study has been done before, in March 1975, by another Society of Physics Students, who reached a slightly different, but similar conclusion [astronomycafe.net]:
So some of the lights are car headlights - this was already known and accepted, I'm pretty sure. I'm disappointed with their 'grant from the Schlumberger corp.' mentioned in the PDF and the equipment they had access to at UTD, these students couldn't do a more in-depth study or come up with a more comprehensive conclusion. Sounds like a group of students at UTD wanted a 4 day all-expenses paid road-trip to one of the more beautiful parts of Texas, down near Big Bend National Park.
Then again, as a UT-Arlington [uta.edu] (UTA [wikipedia.org]) alumnus, I may be a little biased against our cross-Metroplex rivals.
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Weird... (Score:2, Informative)
Highway 67 / Population Density (Score:3, Informative)
As someone who lives in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex and whose company is in an office literally right in front of what I believe is the original terminus of Highway 67, you should know that the path it takes through Dallas and through most of Texas is a pretty odd one; it's a route only a (relatively) modern traffic engineer could come up with, and the path it takes through the mountains near Marfa [google.com] are most likely not related to any common paths taken by carriages before the highway was built.
Also, the population density out in that part of Texas, especially before cars were common in the region, was incredibly low. I doubt there would've been enough carriage traffic on any given night to generate the type and number of phenomenon normally attributed to the Marfa lights. Considering the current population of Marfa is 2,424 people [esc18.net], I'm almost certain there wouldn't have been enough traffic of any sort before Highway 67 was built to generate all of the phenomenon reported during that time.
Re:Do you really need lasers? (Score:5, Informative)
As well as...
The lights seem to either evade or confuse anyone who attempts to walk/drive/fly closer to them, and sometimes they simply vanish if someone seems to get 'too close'. There's even been occasional reports of the lights 'chasing' a car or plane traveling through the region, but no one has ever reported getting close to any of the lights successfully.
Optical illusions (Score:5, Informative)
Now, how does this relate to the lights in the 1800s? Oh, quite easily. I suspect the lights were quite probably fires, but considerably further away and in a completely different place than the observers had expected - which is why they never found anything.
As for people chasing the lights and never reaching them (according to another poster), this is exactly what you expect from an optical illusion from refracted light. Most people have seen this with rainbows, which are also caused by refraction through water droplets. It's the same mechanism, so you get the same "moving" effect. Duh.
In fact, once people had observed they could not "approach" the lights, the physics of it should have been obvious. There aren't many types of illusion which work that way. You can approach a mirage, for example, but it vanishes when you get "too close". If you shine a bright light onto fog, you will get reflected light from it. Etc.
A bit more detective work reveals... (Score:2, Informative)
As I suspected, a bit more detective work reveals that early sightings were first reported well after the event and that folks digging for serious contemporary documentation can find none:
http://www.astronomycafe.net/weird/lights/marfa15. htm [astronomycafe.net]
Turns out that Mr. Ellison never did mention the supposed 1883 sightings in his memoirs (written in 1937 when the man was in his 70's), according to local historian Cecilia Thompson.
Re:Science! (Score:5, Informative)
As someone else pointed out [slashdot.org], the early sightings aren't very well documented [astronomycafe.net] -- the first substantiated reports of the early sightings were made years after the fact and date from well after the highway was built. Even Ellison, it turns out, never actually wrote about the event in his memoirs (1937) -- he told his family about it, and they later told the story to historian Cecilia Thompson or to her source.
The earliest report that researcher could verify was a 1957 magazine article. That doesn't mean the earlier sightings didn't happen, just that they couldn't be verified.
Horse carriages had lights. (Score:2, Informative)
It can be explained by road lights even back in the 1880s. Horse drawn carriages carried lanterns when driving at night.
"The entire coach was dark red with lanterns near the front to help while driving in the dark." [junebaldwinbork.com]
Old timey looking lighting fixtures selling today still go by the name "carriage lantern" or "coach lantern". Google for it.
Let's consider this carefully, shall we? (Score:2, Informative)
1. Photo at www.whattofix.com. No photographer credit on the photo, no history, no nothing. So we can't check its pedigree. I do photo manips, and I can whip you up, say, 200 of these to your specs, in a couple of hours. What colors would you like your lights? Would you like lens flare effects or even fog/haze effects? You name it, I and any of about 300 million other folks could have faked this photo for you. No photographer credit or documentation is always a great tipoff to a hoax.
2. Photo at www.rense.com. So, this was taken on Highway 67 "east of Marfa?" Highway 67 runs north/south through Marfa, not east/west. I'm already smelling hoax here, as the photographer can't even be bothered to do a map check and get his basic geographical facts down for his story. Oh, this is interesting...look at the pattern of lights in the photo. Looks like...erm...well, let's just say that there's an Air Force base in the region which loves to send B1-Bs on extremely low-level missions through the vast scrublands of west Texas/New Mexico where, if you happen to get it all wrong and auger in, you're unlikely to take out hundreds of civilians with you. I'll bet this photo wasn't even taken in Presidio County.
3. Photos at taskboy.com. Sure looks like car headlights or even sun reflecting off chrome at a great distance to me. If you live in Texas like I do and do a lot of driving around in the middle of nowhere, you've seen this a million times. I'm amazed that people can manage to misinterpret stuff like this. This fellow repeats the Robert Ellison myth, meaning that he didn't want to spend the 30 seconds of Googling to find out that the story is completely undocumented. You wanna see more lights like this? Drive north on State Road 4 out of Palo Pinto, Texas. Same deal as you get about 4 miles south of the "mountain" at the eastward bend of 4 near Grayson, on any clear evening. Its a wonderfully eerie effect, but its about as supernatural as kitty litter.
Another view - with photos this time. (Score:2, Informative)
http://westtexasnights.blogspot.com/2005/03/marfa