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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!
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
Sadly, it seems like most people are completely uninterested in scientific explainations for anything :(
:( Maybe if science were more of a topic in school and we had more scientists and well if people in general were so damn superstitious! (That's why ID is really now being taught in schools)
The Science Channel, Discovery and SciFi are RIFE with UFO and Psychic garbage. Why? Because that's what people want. They want to believe that not everything can be explained and actually get rather hostle at times when they are!
As it is, we are pretty low in supply of "scientists" and time to devote to relatively unimportant things like studying swamp light.
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.
All you need is some clever dudes, equipment, and the will to find something out.
Not that clever, if they're attributing this to automotive traffic. There were only a handful of automobiles (all of them "experimental") on the North American continent when the first documented reports emerged (1880s). In effect, they're doing exactly what you blame others for doing: they don't understand what has been causing the lights over the last 120 years, so they pull a scientific possibility out of the hat and give it a go. According to the article, they've been able to create light appearances observable at the same locations as the Marfa lights have been observed by having a vehicle on the highway flashing its lights on and off. This presents the possibility that many of the so called sightings were of cars traveling on the highway. Unfortunately for them, the highway has only been around since 1930... *cue xfiles theme* (not to mention the Marfa lights are often described as being highly distorted, and not always as clear as those observed by the students).
The students did a great job of presenting a possible explanation, but it should be noted that they have not proven / solved anything. Even in their writeup it's mentioned that they were unable to find any historical accounts to compare their findings with. At which point Robert Ellison (first documented sighter) rolled over in his grave and coughed.
"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.
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.
And were never heard from again.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yep, in 1883 it was all the craze to install those Bi-Xenon headlights on your SUV...
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.
As well as...
The lights seem to either evade or confuse anyone who attempts to walk/drive/fly closer to them, and sometimes they simply vanish if someone seems to get 'too close'. There's even been occasional reports of the lights 'chasing' a car or plane traveling through the region, but no one has ever reported getting close to any of the lights successfully.
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)
Religion has to answer the "why".
If one subscribes to the premise that religions are superstition, then there is no "why" at all.
In fact, to even begin to ask why, you have to suppose that there was some purpose for it in the first place, which automatically implies the existence of an intelligence or reasoning entity that designed the purpose.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Unfortunately for them, the highway has only been around since 1930...
As someone else pointed out, the early sightings aren't very well documented -- the first substantiated reports of the early sightings were made years after the fact and date from well after the highway was built. Even Ellison, it turns out, never actually wrote about the event in his memoirs (1937) -- he told his family about it, and they later told the story to historian Cecilia Thompson or to her source.
The earliest report that researcher could verify was a 1957 magazine article. That doesn't mean the earlier sightings didn't happen, just that they couldn't be verified.
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.
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
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.
ID is just a symptom of general ignorance and superstition which is becoming common. On Friday a geophysics student about to start an honors year helping out in her holidays was telling me that CRT computer screens give you the same amount of radiation as a medical X-ray after a week of exposure - of some sort of radiation like X-rays only different and just as damaging - told to her by a doctor apparantly. My explanation of how a CRT works and how an X-ray tube works only got as far as mentioning amounts of energy involved, intensity and target materials before I could tell she thought I was lying to her because I have an agenda to not replace CRTs with LCDs due to cost. Even many of those in science studies have fallen victim to snake oil sociopaths and see technical folk as Moorlocks who will eat their babies to keep technology going.
Back to pseudo-science on TV - one thing that pissed me off intensely was the "roads that go into the sea" crap about Easter Island on one TV program made decades after they were shown to be boat ramps by scuba divers.