Overview
The Marfa Lights appear over Mitchell Flat east of Marfa, Texas — glowing orbs on the desert horizon that hover, split, merge, dance and vanish, reported since cowboy Robert Reed Ellison's 1883 account of unexplained fires and watched ever since by ranchers, wartime pilots who chased them, scientists and busloads of the curious; the town embraced its mystery with an official Marfa Lights Viewing Center on US-90 nine miles east, where watchers gather nightly, and an annual festival. Explanations have ranged across atmospheric refraction of distant headlights — a university study matched many sightings to traffic on US-67 — mirage effects of desert temperature layers, piezoelectric sparking and the cheerfully supernatural: ghost lights of Apache legend's Alsate, lost souls, or the lanterns of the plains dead; the honest record is that some sightings resolve to headlights and some, especially the pre-automobile accounts, resist tidy explanation, which is precisely the appeal. Present the Marfa Lights as the American ghost-light benchmark — folklore, science and desert night sky sharing one horizon; the viewing centre makes this the platform's most watchable mystery.