Marfa lights

[9][10] In 1976 Elton Miles's Tales of the Big Bend included stories dating to the 19th century and a photograph of the Marfa lights by a local rancher.

He has identified "an average of 9.5 MLs on 5.25 nights per year", but believes that the monitoring stations may only be finding half of the Marfa lights in Mitchell Flat.

[7]: 261 Skeptic Brian Dunning notes that the designated "View Park" for the lights, a roadside park on the south side of U.S. Route 90 about 9 miles (14 km) east of Marfa, is at the site of Marfa Army Airfield, where tens of thousands of personnel were stationed between 1942 and 1947, training American and Allied pilots.

Since Marfa AAF and its satellite fields are each constantly patrolled by sentries, they consider it unlikely that any unusual phenomena would remain unobserved and unmentioned.

According to Dunning, the likeliest explanation is that the lights are a sort of mirage caused by sharp temperature gradients between cold and warm layers of air.

[11] Marfa is at an elevation of 4,688 ft (1,429 m) above sea level, and differences of 40–50 °F (22–28 °C) between daily high and low temperatures are quite common.

In May 2004 a group from the Society of Physics Students at the University of Texas at Dallas spent four days investigating and recording lights observed southwest of the view park using traffic volume-monitoring equipment, video cameras, binoculars, and chase cars.