In Defense of the Marfa Lights

Book excerpt: In Defense of Marfa Lights These days, Marfa, Texas, is a mecca for art and artists. But Mitchell Flat, a vast stretch of ranch land to the east of Marfa, is a much older mecca, not for art, but for lights. Since the 19th century, reports of mysterious or unexplained lights have intrigued people who live in this far west Texas area. Some visitors (and there are many) declare distant, moving lights to be mysterious, while more skeptical visitors may tell you that what they saw were ranch lights and vehicle headlights. Who is right? What are these lights? A major research effort might give answers. But the answer boils down not to a concrete, singular fact, but rather to a choice between two camps. Author James Bunnell is squarely in the camp that rejects the headlights theory and pushes for more scientific investigation because he believes the lights are unusual, natural phenomena that have much to tell us about our own Earth. Unlike the headlight theorists, some of whom have never visited Marfa or Mitchell Flat, Bunnell backs up his conclusions about the lights with ten years of firsthand observations, photographs of many mysterious lights from multiple automatic night cameras, and a unique base of his own photographic evidence taken by him, onsite, in real time. He concludes A VERY SMALL NUMBER of these lights are indeed mysterious natural phenomena. A retired aerospace engineer, Bunnell has no quarrel with light gazers who have come to Mitchell Flat, seen lights, and declared them to be headlights. He understands why: Explainable lights heavily outnumber mysterious lights. A much different matter are those who do not come to Marfa, who question him at length over a series of months and then use, without permission, his copyrighted photographs and data to prove that mysterious lights do not exist. Those are the people who made this book necessary. This book is a closer look at what they did, and what James Bunnell did. You choose.