The Marfa Lights


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The ghost lights have entranced area settlers and visitors for more than a century. Some viewers claim to have seem them up close, describing them as one or two (occasionally more) red or yellow or bluish lights about the size of basketballs, or one colored basketball-sized light, or as a single, startlingly bright light. Car lights on distant roadways account for virtually all of the sightings from the Marfa Lights Visitor Center, but local residents know about these and say that the true Marfa Lights are not these, but more mysterious and very rare lights seen on the flatlands. Many explanations have been offered for these mysterious lights, including 'swamp gas', hallucinations, and even solar storms.

A 'GOOGLE' search turned up over 32,000 pages about Marfa Lights alone, and most of them are either repetitious, or are basically the same type of uncritical discussion

  1. General Descriptions
  2. Things I need to find out
  3. Things I need to do.
  4. Basic Information about the area
    1. How to get to Marfa, Texas
    2. Early History
    3. In the news media
    4. The Weather
    5. Tourism
    6. Plants and Animals
    7. Useful References that Seem Reliable
  5. Geographical Information
    1. The Viewing Area
    2. Maps of Sighting Areas and Geography
    3. Highway 90 and 67 plus others
    4. The view from the Viewing Area
    5. The Old Air Base
    6. The Radio Tower
    7. The Radio Observatory
    8. Geology and Oil Prospecting
  6. Observations of the Lights
    1. The Lights Themselves
    2. Naked eye accounts.
    3. Legal Status of Eye-Witness Accounts.
    4. Telescopic Views
    5. VLF-Whistler Observations
    6. Close Encounter stories
    7. The History of Sightings
    8. Pilots Accounts from the Air
    9. Photos from Various Web sites
    10. A Meticulous Student Investigation
    11. A Hyperspectral Investigation by Alto Technologies
    12. Samples of dialogues between observers/skeptics
    13. People mentioned in the accounts
  7. Explanations
    1. Theories about the lights
    2. Typical mis-information
    3. Comparing Naked Eye accounts with Acuity Problems
    4. Are they car lights?
    5. Human Visual Acuity