Marfa Lights: The UT Dallas Headlight Study

Out on the high desert east of Marfa, Texas, people have watched strange lights for generations. They hang low over Mitchell Flat, above the brush and below the dark line of the mesas. They split apart, melt together, disappear and reappear. Retired aerospace engineer James Bunnell describes orbs of light, usually yellow-orange, sometimes green, blue or red. Some move. Some stay perfectly still.

The reports go back to 1883. A cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison thought he saw an Apache campfire near Paisano Pass. No camp was ever found. In 2003 the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center opened on U.S. 90, about 9 miles east of town, on the grounds of the old Marfa Army Airfield.

May 2004. About twelve members of the Society of Physics Students at UT Dallas made the trip. They camped at Fort Davis. For four nights they watched the dark southwest of the view park, toward U.S. 67, the road between Marfa and Presidio.

They came prepared. Traffic counters. Video cameras, including high-speed video. Binoculars. Chase cars. One account adds lasers and walkie-talkies. "We came up with a list of eight experiments … and three worked really well," Jeff Klenzing recalled.

The lights came. And a pattern emerged. How often they appeared tracked the traffic on U.S. 67. Their movement followed a straight line that matched the highway. When one car passed another, one light seemed to pass another.

Then came the test. A team vehicle parked on U.S. 67 and flashed its headlights. Back at the view park, about two miles away, the observers saw what looked like a Marfa light. Night photographs laid over daytime shots from the same camera position showed Highway 67 in the distance, exactly where the light appeared.

The students concluded that every light they saw southwest of the view park over those four nights could be reliably attributed to automobile headlights traveling along U.S. 67 between Marfa and Presidio. Their report, An Experimental Analysis of the Marfa Lights, is credited to A. Stolyarov, J. Klenzing, P. Roddy and R. Heelis. The claim was narrow. It covered only the lights seen on those nights.

Not everyone was convinced. Critics noted that the reports reach back to 1883, about 16 years before the first cars reached Texas. The sample was small, and Atlas Obscura called the findings still far from conclusive. Texas Monthly reportedly called the trip a high-tech frat party, and its writer said they had personally seen lights that were not headlights. Years earlier, in 1990, James Long had watched lights through an 8-inch telescope pass behind rocks on the mountainside. Headlights, he said, could not do that.

Others built on the work. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid came to favour headlights distorted by superior mirage. Karl Stephan argued that headlights and mirages are generally easy to tell apart from the real phenomenon. In May 2008 a Texas State University team spent 20 nights with spectroscopy and recorded only car headlights and small fires. Bunnell's cameras logged 60 lights he counted as true on 31 nights between 2000 and 2009.

The 2004 study did not close the case. It drew a line between the lights anyone can explain and the ones that remain. Wikipedia's list of reportedly haunted places in the United States still cites it, beside the note that the Marfa lights have been attributed to haunting. The viewing center still faces Mitchell Flat, waiting for dark.