Speaker 1: The mysterious Marfa Lights. In eighteen eighty three, sixteen year
old Robert Ellison was working as a cowboy on a
cattle driveway out in West Texas. The group had decided
to camp overnight on the wide flat terrain about a
dozen miles east of the little community of Marfa. When
night fell, Ellison had trouble sleeping as he was concerned
about the strange flickering lights that he could see in
the distance. When he pointed them out to the others
and his party, they shared his concern. Those could be
a patch of fires in the mountains, someone said, But
the next morning, a thorough search of the territory revealed
no deserted camps. In fact, the group could find no
explanation at all for the dancing points of illumination. It
was a mystery, and about to become a famous one. Today,
Robert Ellison is considered to be the first white man
to witness the Marpha Lights. Marfa, Texas, is a community
of some three thousand souls that sits about one hundred
miles northwest of Big Ben National Park. It's claim to
fame are quirky and varied. Marfa was the filming location
of the nineteen fifty five movie Giant. It boosts the
golf course with the highest elevation in Texas four thousand,
six hundred and eighty eight feet, and is home to
the Marfa Lights. Of those three attractions, the lights have
proven to be the greatest tourism boon. Every year, on
Labor Day weekend, thousands of people flocked to the area
to take part in the Marpha Lights Festival, an event
complete with a parade, a rodeo, street dancing, food, and
plenty of discussion of the phenomenal being celebrated. Best of all,
for the town, the appeal of the lights is there
the whole year long. The traffic has always been so steady,
and the local rangers were becoming so frustrated by trespassers
that an official viewing area was built on Michelin Flats,
nine miles east of town on Highway ninety. There On
any pleasant evening, dozens of curious people will gather to
watch the supernatural show. Rarely are they ever disappointed. There
are cynics who like to say that the Morpha Lights
are more about money than they are about mystery. Still,
even those folks have to admit that the economic benefit
would have vanished long ago if the paranormal phenomenon had
not continued to intrigue. The lights are just too dorn
interesting and too hard to dismiss. They are dramatic as well,
rewarding those who visit the viewing area with the show
that sometimes rivals a firework display. The lights can appear
as bright white or any number of vivid colors. People
have seen brilliant green, yellow, red, and orange globes floating
and dancing in the nice sky. Two separate points of
light will be sometimes emerged together, or single lights would
divide in two. They have been known to circle one another,
moving together in gracefully choreographed patterns, and then shoot off
in different directions. Sometimes a light will display a halo
of coppery sparks or send off showers of blue and
orange ones. The sightings are frequent and they are never dull. Today,
most people watch the Morpha lights from the designated roadside area,
which looks out over the abandoned air base toward the
distant Chinta Mountains. They have also been sighted from the air, however,
by pilots who were confused by these strange beacons. According
to Michael Norman and Beth Scott and Haunted America, Tom
Daughtry Associates, nineteen ninety four. The phenomenon was intensely investigated
by both the Air Force and the Army until the
Pentagon issued a directive to leave the lights alone. No
government order could ever keep people from speculating about the
origin of this phantom fire. However, in the days long
before Robert Ellison discovered the lights, Apache Indians believed the
glowing orbs to be inhabitants of the spirit world. There
were natives and settlers alike who took the lights to
be a sign that an executive Apache chief named Islat
was searching for his lost tribe. There is an enduring
legend that explains the phenomenon as camphires from long ago,
another that portrays the light as witches or demons. And
then there are countless ufo theories. For every person who
can put forth a supernatural theory, however, there are two
who are eager to bring on the science. The most
common natural explanation for the Marpha lights and every similar
phenomenon on record is that there are simply the headlights
of cars on a distant highway Undoubtedly, this explanation accounts
for some of these sightings, but not all. It could
not explain the colored lights, the bouncing ones, or those
that were routinely seen before automobiles traveled the landscape. One
of the most interesting and plausible hypotheses is that the
lights may be the result of the nova Zemla effect,
and which lights from distant sources have been refracted by
the atmosphere and made to appear far from their sources.
It is said that this effect could not be at
work on overcast nights, however, and the Marpha lights put
on a fairly dependable show come rain or moonshine. Other
suggestions have ranged from the Muddane ball lighting to the
ridiculous stack rabbits that have been coated with phosphorus, with
some reasonable but yet to be proven theories fallen in between.
The truth is, in this case, the skeptics have had
as little luck proving their hunches as have the believers
in the paranormal. It was once said that finding the
light's origin was like trying to catch a rainbow. What
causes the lights is a true mystery, and that's a
large part of the appeal. Richard A. Lovett wrote about
the lights in the April sixteenth, nineteen ninety five Denver Post.
He said, whatever the explanation for the lights, the attempt
to spot them brings one face to face with the
realization that there are still many things that the modern world,
for all of its intellectual powers, has yet to understand.
That in a nutshell, may be why people love to
go looking for the famous Morpha lights.