Summary
Lights over Mitchell Flat, south of U.S. 90 east of Marfa, Texas, are a standing local report. The town’s telling starts in 1883, when cowhand Robert Reed Ellison is said to have taken a flicker near Paisano Pass for an Apache campfire and found no ashes the next morning. He did not put that in the memoir he wrote in 1937. The first known newspaper story ran in February 1945. On an ordinary night the lights from the roadside park line up with traffic on U.S. 67, the road from Marfa toward Presidio. A smaller set of recordings, aimed off that highway, is still unexplained.
Background
Marfa sits in Presidio County, on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. The place people watch from is a pull-off on U.S. 90 about nine miles east of town, facing south across Mitchell Flat toward the Chinati Mountains. Witnesses describe low lights, usually white, yellow, orange, or red, that brighten, fade, split, merge, and go out. Those are reports of how the lights look. They are not a measured spectrum.
The Handbook of Texas repeats a later local history: Ellison in 1883, Joe and Sally Humphreys in 1885, and cowboys in the summer of 1919 who rode toward the lights and came back with nothing. Ellison’s granddaughter, Rosemary Cox, told Texas Monthly in 2006 that he spoke of lights the family could not explain and thought were Indian fires. She had read his 1937 memoir twice and found no mention of them. The only bright thing in that cattle-drive passage is a human skull one of his men kicked out of the grass at Paisano Pass. A plaque at the viewing center also says O. W. Williams wrote of the lights in the 1880s. His grandson told the same reporter that Williams heard campfire stories, including an Apache name, Alsate’s Ghost, and spoke of seeing lights, and that those sightings were not written down.
The first known published account is a February 1945 San Angelo Times piece, “Ghost Light Appears in Marfa Area.” A 1957 Coronet article followed. The Handbook of Texas says pilots training nearby during the Second World War looked for the lights from the air and did not find a source. That is a search, not a record of an encounter in 1943.
In 2003 the old pull-off was rebuilt as the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center, with federal and Texas Department of Transportation money. Clayton Williams, O. W. Williams’s grandson, donated the ten acres. The center is a roadside stop. It does not staff a nightly watch.
In May 2004, students from the Society of Physics Students at the University of Texas at Dallas spent four nights at the park with cameras, a traffic counter, and a chase car. U.S. 67 is visible from the park. The lights southwest of the park came and went with traffic on that road and moved in a straight line along it. When they parked a car on 67 and flashed the headlights, the flash showed at the park as one of the lights. A car passing that vehicle showed as one light passing another. Every light they recorded southwest of the park on that trip fit the highway. Michael Hall, watching with binoculars for Texas Monthly in 2006, saw the same pattern: each pulse matched a car lining up with the viewing center, and the path of the lights drew the road.
James Bunnell, a retired aerospace engineer, has said the same thing about the ordinary show. Most of what the park displays is the Presidio highway. After a sighting in 2000 he set up cameras on nearby ranches, pointed away from the Chinatis and away from U.S. 67, and published frames in Night Orbs of lights that do not follow that road. He puts those nights at fewer than thirty a year, best looked for south or southeast of Goat Mountain, just after sunset or just before dawn. In 2006 he guessed that plasma from the inner Van Allen belt was being turned aside by volcanic rock under Mitchell Flat. That is his hypothesis. His cameras did not measure a piezoelectric discharge, and they did not tie the frames to fault lines in the Solitario.