Scientists watched these lights for eight years and worked out what they are. People still drive out to see them, and they are right to.
The Marfa lights appear in the desert near Marfa in West Texas. The best known viewing spot is a widened shoulder on Highway 90 about nine miles east of town, and there is now a Marfa Lights Viewing Center. Watchers describe orbs that change in intensity and colour, sometimes moving and sometimes still, splitting and merging, usually yellow-orange but occasionally green, blue or red, and generally floating above the desert vegetation but below the mesas behind. What separates them from ranch lights and the traffic on Highway 67 is how they move.
The first record dates to 1883, when a young cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison saw a flickering light while driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered whether he was looking at an Apache campfire. Other settlers told him they saw the lights often, and that when they went to investigate they found no ashes and no sign of a camp. Joe and Anne Humphreys reported them in 1885. The first published account did not appear until the July 1957 issue of Coronet magazine, and Elton Miles gathered the older stories into Tales of the Big Bend in 1976.
Observers working between 2000 and 2008 concluded that the lights are automobile headlights, distorted by warm desert air. That is the answer, and it spoils nothing. What you are standing there watching is the atmosphere itself bending light across miles of open desert, which is a stranger thing to see than a lantern.
Marfa earns the drive on its own. It sits in the Chihuahuan Desert, an unlikely mixture of old ranching families and artists, Donald Judd being the famous one, and the town promotes the largest dark sky preserve in the world. Come for the lights, stay for the sky they hang in.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
