Marfa Lights!

While we were at Davis Mountains State Park we took the opportunity to travel down to Marfa, do some laundry, get some dinner and of course drive 8 miles out of town to the Marfa Lights observation area to see if the lights made an appearance. By the time we got there, it was about 9:30 and was very dark. There wasn’t a lot of light pollution except way out on the horizon from some nearby towns. The stars were out in all their glory that only a true black sky country can produce! 

I have to admit that I am a skeptic when it comes to these things. The observation area faces south and as we walked up to the building and came around the front we were surprised to see that there was in fact some lights out in the distance along the horizon. There were 6-10 other people there and everyone was interested in what the lights might be. The first light we saw was pretty much straight out from us near the perceived horizon and maybe a little bit to the left. It was steady and not moving and stayed there for several minutes until it just seemed to turn off. During that same time and up until we left, there were also several lights appearing and disappearing, sometimes 3, 4, 5 or so, off to the right near a flashing red light that was probably the top of a tower. Those lights were clearly moving, and they all seemed to be moving from left to right at the same height near the red light. Were these the famous and mysterious Marfa Lights?!

******spoiler alert***** They sure looked like cars moving along the horizon to me. There was another light just to the left of the red light that appeared periodically and seemed to be a little bit higher that just appeared and disappeared without moving.  I’m less certain that was a car because it didn’t seem to move and it was higher than the other lights while still along the horizon. The light to the far left never reappeared.

So the question we have to ask ourselves first is did we actually see the Marfa lights that people claim occur there? I didn’t see anything terribly mysterious about them, but there were definitely lights out on the horizon, appearing and disappearing, and some of them were moving around but in our case in a very linear fashion, as if on a road. Even using my binoculars, I couldn’t break out whether each of these lights was in fact, two headlights. They appeared only as a single light to my eyes. So, I will leave it up to you, the reader, to decide for yourself. What do you think these mysterious lights are?

I do know that the people around Marfa and other towns around here almost certainly do not want these explained! We noticed in both Fort Davis and Marfa that a lot of restaurants and businesses seemed to be shut down and the towns seem to be struggling. Anything that brings in tourists would be a welcome relief. I think that they want people coming into town regardless of the true nature of the lights and so the mystery remains, as William Shatner says, “unexplained”!