Can the Marfa Mystery Lights be explained?

Verify Road Trip, from the fact-checking team at TEGNA’s VERIFY, posted this episode in April 2017. A veteran reporter takes third-grade teacher Erica Wiggins, who had seen the lights once before, from Midland to the Marfa Lights viewing station to find out whether science can explain what she saw.

On the way they talk by video call with James Bunnell, a retired aerospace engineer who has written several books on the lights and thinks the true Marfa lights are probably plasma. Rosemary Cox tells family stories going back to her grandfather Robert Ellison, said to be the first rancher to report the lights in 1883, and insists they should stay a mystery. At the viewing station, a low-light camera shows that some “floating” lights are cars on a mountain road about 20 miles away, blinking as terrain hides them, and a flight over the area the next morning shows how far away those roads really are.

The episode reaches the same conclusion as most controlled studies: many of the lights seen from the viewing station are headlights on distant highways, made to shimmer and blink by distance, terrain and the layered desert air. It is less critical of Bunnell’s plasma idea, which remains a hypothesis rather than an established finding.

The Robert Ellison story also deserves care. It comes from family tradition; Ellison did not mention the lights in his own 1937 memoir, and the earliest known published report dates from 1957.