Nine miles east of Marfa, Texas, people park on the shoulder of U.S. 90 and watch orbs hover, split and drift over the desert. Physicists have traced most of them to headlights 20 miles out. The rancher whose family named the flat has seen two he can't explain.
Nine miles east of Marfa, Texas, the state keeps a pull-off on U.S. 90 where people park in the dark and watch for lights nobody has been able to name. They come up over Mitchell Flat, the basin that runs south toward the mountains of Mexico: orbs that hover and drift, brighten and dim, split in two and merge back together. Usually yellow-orange. Sometimes green, or blue, or red.
Joaquin Jackson, a retired Texas Ranger living up the road in Alpine, was driving toward Marfa around five-thirty one morning when three of them came on about a mile to the south. "They'd get real bright, then get dim, but before they went out, shooo! They'd shoot out across the horizon to the right in the blink of an eye," he told Texas Monthly. "It damn sure wasn't headlights."
The historical marker at the pull-off credits the first recorded sighting to a rancher named Robert Ellison, driving cattle through Paisano Pass in 1883. He took the lights for Apache campfires. Settlers rode out to find the camps and turned up no ashes, no gear, nothing. A second bronze plaque a few feet away says the Apache themselves believed the lights were stars dropping to the earth.
Ellison wrote his memoir in 1937 and never mentioned any of it. His granddaughter Rosemary Cox went through the manuscript twice at a reporter's request and found the lights nowhere in it. The only strange thing in its pages is a human skull one of his men kicked up out of the grass while they were camped at Paisano Pass. "This was just a cowboy's story," she said. "All in the world it was." Texas Monthly, going back through the record, turns up no written account of the lights older than February 1945, when the San Angelo Times ran a story headlined "Ghost Light Appears in Marfa Area."
Physicists keep coming out here, and they keep finding cars. In 2004, 12 students from the University of Texas at Dallas spent four nights on the Flat with lasers, a chase car and a traffic counter, and matched the lights to vehicles on U.S. 67, 20 miles out, same straight lines, same timing. In 2008 Karl Stephan's group from Texas State logged 20 nights at the viewing station with a telescope and a spectrometer, reported every source they caught as a headlight or a small fire, and concluded that real Marfa lights, if they come at all, come rarely.
By Texas Monthly's account, the Flat carries the name of rancher Kerr Mitchell's family. Mitchell has no patience for the viewing center. "It's good for tourists," he said, "but you're telling them something that is completely and totally incorrect." He also keeps a count of the lights he cannot account for, and it stands at two. "The first night, I was outside and saw this light, and it was just indescribable — this massive, enormous white light. I thought I was dreaming."
