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Marfa Lights Explained
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.)"
I didn't know there were major highways with automobiles running around on them back when the lights first were seen...
For a while now, and I'm rather glad it's been explained.
r y/bluelight.htm
Now if they'd move on to the Blue Light Cemetery, I'd be more interested.
http://www.cemeteries-of-tx.com/Etx/Harris/cemete
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
It's sad that we can cook our meals with microwaves, but don't know answers to questions like this. I thought science was supposed to answer the how and why. If so, they really should devote time to explaining local phenomena like this. Leaving unanswered questions for things so visible and widely known makes science look like a bunch of blowhards. THIS is why intelligent design is even considered in schools...
Lights in distance probably headlights from far off cars! Populace of Marfa stunned! Physicists skeptical! Sensastionalists de-sensastionalized!
I've never heard of these "Marfa Lights," but I can't help making fun of them out of context...
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Marfa Video
So, it's like an episode of Scooby-Doo basically, everyone knows the lights are cars but the local area has used it as sort of fun way of attracting tourists and they even have a festival around the event. See http://www.qsl.net/w5www/marfa.html . So, it's kind of sad that these students went to this amount of trouble to explain away the lights.
I think it's interesting that the local legend has it that the lights have been there before cars and that you hear a tuning fork sound in one ear. Obviously these little details have been added to add the little bit of doubt to keep the charade going and to draw some more money into town.
It's a fun thing... let it go, as I'm sure the people down there will not be accepting of even a scientific study like this.
...or am I the only one who originally misread it as "Mafia lights"?
Similar legend here...
Never witnessed it myself, but interesting how they share several similar characteristics in their stories...
http://www.prairieghosts.com/devprom.html
Read this as "Mafia Lights Explained"?
"Oh shit," I thought, "now that it's been explained to me, they'll come after me next!"
I'm sure we won't be hearing from the OP anymore.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Just more proof of the reasoning and rationality that science provides.
Don't understand something? Lets say ghosts did it! Or aliens!
The world is far too complex to assume such magical explanations. All you need is some clever dudes, equipment, and the will to find something out.
Thats what they want you to think
Boss: Yo Ruff ilb, I'll explain de lights, but you hafta keep'em secret. Othuhwise we gunna send yer ass back here tuh Vinny. Right, Vinny?
;)
Vinny: *sharpens chainsaw* Ey, fuggeddaboudit.
Boss: You 'erd 'im, kid. Keep da family secrets secret, capeesh?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Back in the '70s I read an old (even then) Popular Science magazine article about these lights, and the car headlight explanation!
Duh.
I, for one, welcome our new automobile headlight overlords.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
and my tuition money (I'm a UTD student) at work too. I'm glad that they are about to jack it up even more so that a bunch of physics students can go camping on my dime to explain something that is rather obvious to the causal observer and already explained.
I guess part of the path of a university to become "important" is to do a bunch of these useless/pointless projects just for the sake of getting our name out there.
What I saw at Marfa, which everyone there explained to be the Marfa lights, where easily recognized as lights from traffic. I know the arguement is that there where lights before the highway was there, however, that doesen't mean the lights they see now are the same as what was seen then. I took long exposure shots of the current lights and they followed an easily tracable path, which conincides with the highway. The distortion/shimmer is easily explained with the point of view, distance and heat rising off the earth at night. Not much else to say, imo. I certainly won't rule out that there are other more interesting lights, but I was utterly unimpressed with what I've seen. I do like Marfa though, and it's still fun. Any excuse to be out in the pitch black desert at night is good enough for me.
Is this similar to the Bingham Light phenomenon here in South Carolina?
"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."
When leading scientists can't figure it out, leave it up to students.
Lasers are good and all, but why haven't somebody just walked/drove in the direction of the lights?!
MOD PARENT UP
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.
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:
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) alumnus, I may be a little biased against our cross-Metroplex rivals.
Yep, in 1883 it was all the craze to install those Bi-Xenon headlights on your SUV...
Marfa is a small town near what used to be an army fort established to keep Indians out of Texas. The lights were unexplained even back then. Sometimes the army would chase after the lights thinking that they were enemy campfires, but they never seemed to catch them. ...maybe just a legend. But, having been there, if it were caused by headlights I imagine it would follow the same path every time -- whereas in actuality they move about seemingly random in the sky.
Highway 67 was commissioned in 1927 as US Highway 67, and ended in Dallas. It didn't reach West Texas, including Marfa, until 1930. Source: Wikipedia.
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 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, 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.
My ex-roommate was one of the physics students who went on the trip. They went in the summer of 2004, and it was basicaly an excuse to get funding so they could go on a road trip/camping. From what I hear they also brought along plenty of booze and weren't exactly in a 'scientific' mindset most of the trip. They had fun though, and got a free trip out of it, so more power to them.
This is idiotic. I grew up in West Texas and we've ALWAYS known the Marfa Lights were headlights. What an utter waste of time.
"Headlights Create Marfa Lights As Cars Pass" is Science?
Wake me up when Marfa Lights create you!
About five years ago I took a detour from a trip to Big Bend to see the Marfa Lights. Soooo lame. It looks exactly like cars driving down a distant highway. I can't imagine why anyone would want to spend more than 5 minutes there, much less try to explain them.
-Chris (aka Lenwood)
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Anyone else notice the Google Maps screencap in the PDF? Used to good effect I must say.
- What are we Doing tonight Brain?
- The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Get psyched over distant carlights!
- NARF!
...makes me glad we don't have contact with any extraterrestrial species, yet. Imagine explaining this one: "Have you been sending saucers to spy on our desert? No, wait, never mind, we just figured out it was the light from our own ground vehicles." Prove your sentience after that conversation!
> What I saw at Marfa, which everyone there explained to be the Marfa lights, where easily recognized as lights from traffic. I know the arguement is that there where lights before the highway was there, however, that doesen't mean the lights they see now are the same as what was seen then.
Probably no one would have made any fuss over the auto lights if not for the pre-existing legend.
Factor out the modern phenomenon and you're left with one of thousands of unsubstantiable claims of ghost lights around the world. Maybe some of them actually had some basis in fact, but at this date it's nigh impossible to tell which ones, let alone to investigate the source of light seen 100 years ago.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The explaination is headlights from UFOs? What a let down. Surprised it turned out to be something so mundane. Now how do we get the little green buggers to use their low beams?
10kW is meaningless if you don't know which thread you're posting in.
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
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.
We have a local legend about a "ghost lights cemetary" just south of Springtown, Texas. I've taken a look and it is indeed caused by small particles in the tombstone material that is more reflective than the rest of the stone. It reflects the pale glow on the horizon of the nearby town's lights at night. Quite eerie the first time you see it and locals insist that supernatural things happen there but the phenomenon is easily explanable. Tombstones further away give the most interesting effect as the light seems to eminate away from any observable objects, as if floating in mid-air.
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.
It says in the PDF:
Members of the chase team observing the mystery lights viewing area with binoculars could not identify car headlights, but did observe a 1 mW laser that was being shone towards their location.
Although it doesn't say if the laser behaved like the other lights; my assumption was that it was just used to establish direct line-of-sight
Snarf This.
Actually, no idea what causes the light. Since reports date automobiles and electricity to the region..... Have any of these students given thought to the Marfa Dry line? It's a pretty well known fact in the weather world. Doesn't explain the lights, but I find it odd that people often say things like "humidity", "moisture", etc. when explaining these lights and never does one of them mention of the Marfa Dry line. Hmmm. Could it be there is a link? LOL
For those who grumble that there was no highway south back in the day, there is ample evidence of at least one other roadbed running the same stretch southward crossing back and forth over Highway 67 in a less direct path. The roadbed seen in the satellite imagery is not on the current map as a road, but it's clear that's what it was.
Physics Students, Women in Engineering, and the Gun Club? Man, I'd love to see the after party on that one....
I didn't know there were major highways with automobiles running around on them back when the lights first were seen...
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."
Old timey looking lighting fixtures selling today still go by the name "carriage lantern" or "coach lantern". Google for it.
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.
ftfa..
"Others have scoffed at the idea that the lights are anything more than headlights, and claim proof using high-powered binoculars. This latter group is at a loss, however, to explain why there are often more Lights than there are cars, or why the lights merge, divide and disappear."
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Photos and one blogger's experience of the Marfa Lights.- lights.html
http://westtexasnights.blogspot.com/2005/03/marfa
I'm not going to comment on the religious nature of many early immigrants to the Americas - many outstanding centres of science have been based in places which to a European (me) appear to be very religiously orientated
My point is that the spreading of population across America's vast spaces took place at a time when European nations had been fully farmed and occupied for over a thousand years.
as a result you've always had small rural populations, which are classic sources of mythology and folklore, and this has led to a cultural appreciation of unscientific beliefs which has survived the astonishing prowess of American science due to its deeply-ingrained nature
I suppose in some ways it makes your people more open to innovative (read, outlandish) scientific theories, which has led both to some of the silly beliefs present in present-day US, and some of the more amazing genuine discoveries.
We Europeans see Americans as slightly naive, but it would be kinder to describe your culture as more willing to investigate what many of us would just ignore.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The whole pre-existing legend might have just been created to enduce local commerce by telling anyone from out of town that the lights have been there for over 150 years. People who wouldn't usually drive a few hundred miles to visit the Marfa General store or the old mobil fillin' station, now have a reason to go there.
Look at the loch ness, one day some scientist will discover that the monster is actually just an old sunken boat that appears whenever the water level gets low enough, after that people will say "well, scotland's just a place where men wear miniskirts" without even mentioning the lake.
That's what happens when someone who loves to show off their brain points out a blatently obvious fact which was only covered up by people trying to preserve their local folklore.
Why lie when you can just make up stuff and claim it to be true?
Really weird optical effects happen in cold air areas too - like the false suns seen in Antarctica at times.
Next one - crop circles. Drunken Australian tourists with sticks and rope in at least a few of the early cases.
they have been around longer than car with head lignts!
Here is a good site about them. He did spectral analysis to prove they are not headlights, the spectral results used to be within this web site somewhere but it appears he went on to write a book showing his results. This guy used to be my boss, I trust what he has to say. They are not headlights.
http://www.nightorbs.net/index.html
Mafia lights?
For some odd reason I don't want to know.
It is probably some poor sap who is getting a new pair of cement shoes.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Teens are using their cell phones as flashlights...
Mystery solved. Move along...
These have been definitively explained about six times, each time exactly the same way. And then everyone apparently forgets what the explanation was last time, and/or a bunch of people say 'nooo, it COULDN'T be headlights, because that's not a cool enough explanation!' and we go back into the same roll-around again. My science writing prof in college, lo these many years ago, was part of the first or second team to go and sniff it out with an actual PhD in optics and all sorts of funky equipment, and he wrote up an article for Science News and a big brassy Popular Science article on it. (If I could remember his name I'd include it here, but it's, ah, been a while.)
I wish people would just give it up. They're not mysterious any more.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Well, since everyone here seems to doubt that they are car lights, why not just get everyone to go a different way during a lull in traffic (so as to incenvenience as few people as possible). If the lights still appear, then they're not car lights.
And anyway, if they were head or taillights, wouldn't they only be white or red?
Well, it is certainly true that a book I have from 1750 describes thunder as the explosions of evaporated gunpowder, so a lack of understanding is certainly possible. On the other hand, we're in the early 21st century now, so I would have expected somebody to have figured this all out in the intervening hundred to hundred and fifty years.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If one of them went back in time and changed things, the spelling might be different.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If we were going to anally probe members of your species, do you think we would start with the trailer trash?!?!? -The Aliens
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
-Jimmy Two-Times
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A useful explanation of the phenomenon here. Note that it doesn't have to be a light source.
First:
"The Marfa mystery lights are a
phenomenon that occurs after dusk
outside the town of Marfa,"
then
"Traffic volume decreases after dusk just as the
number of observed mystery lights"
If they don't occur until after dusk, and then decrease, that means the Marfa lights appear in negative numbers. No wonder nobody knows what they are. There are less than none of them to study.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...is doing some interesting things. They are a former junior college, and they are heavily recruiting valedictorians via nice scholarships, and doing things to attract other smart kids (nationally ranked chess club, etc). If I was trying to make my new university stronger, I'd be doing exactly what they're doing.
They have this thing called the McDermott (sp?) Scholars. My friend from high school is one. They are, among other things, required to study abroad as part of the program. They also get something like a full ride at the university.