If you drive out to West Texas, close to Marfa and about 100 miles from El Paso, you will come across a viewing station for “The Marfa Lights”.
What are they?
To get a detailed story, visit this website, but actually I can describe them for you, because I’ve seen them. They are lights that appear to be in the air, and which move around a little, and which can be viewed from a distance of a few miles and which no-one can adequately explain. No-one really knows what they are.
The Marfa lights are not UFOs (whatever UFOs might be) because they always appear in the same place – over uninhabited scrubland just outside Marfa. They also appear just about every night – and they have been known about at least since 1883 (when there was no electricity service in the area). They are so dependable that the Texas Highway Department built the viewing station, with real taxpayers money, on Highway 67/90 and put up a plaque telling you about the lights – but, of course, it doesn’t tell you much.
The phenomenon is not confined to Marfa. There are reports of a similar phenomenon in Saratoga (Texas), Brown Mountain (North Carolina) and in Derbyshire in the UK, and there are probably quite a few other places that have never made it onto a web site.
The truly impressive thing about this phenomenon is that – for the moment at least – no-one has got a good explanation or even a bad explanation. There are not many wacky explanations of the lights. The phenomenon seems to be completely devoid of conspiracy theories. Clearly the CIA, FBI, KGB, MI5, etc. ought to be trying to suppress this phenomenon but simply don’t have the staff or the budget. Men in black are similarly blasé about the whole thing, never having been seen in the area. Aliens ought to be choosing such spots to abduct people or crash a UFO, but even they don’t have the decency to add to the mystery.
Skeptics in the scientific community ought to be proclaiming that the lights don’t exist, or that they are caused by marsh gas, or Venus-low-in-the-sky, but they don’t want to get involved. “I mean, dammit, they are lights, we just don’t know what causes them”. The phenomenon doesn’t even have much of a footprint on the web; Google “mysterious lights” and you get a mere 21,700 hits – many of which are actually links to web sites about Auroras.
It’s all a bit of a mystery, to be honest…
