Marfa Lights — the ghost lights of West Texas since the 1880s

The Marfa lights are mysterious glowing orbs that have been observed in the desert outside the town of Marfa in far West Texas since at least the 1880s. The first recorded sighting was by rancher Robert Reed Ellison in 1883, who believed the lights were Apache campfires. When he investigated the next morning, he found no ashes or evidence of any fire. The lights typically appear as bright, basketball-sized orbs that hover, split, merge, and dart across the desert floor near Mitchell Flat, between Marfa and the Chinati Mountains. They appear in various colors — white, yellow, orange, red, and occasionally blue — and can be observed from a designated viewing area on U.S. Route 67 that the Texas Department of Transportation maintains with permanent seating. In May 2004, students from the University of Texas at Dallas conducted a scientific investigation, concluding that the lights they observed were headlights from vehicles on nearby U.S. Route 67. However, residents and longtime observers insist the genuine Marfa lights behave differently from car headlights and were seen decades before the highway existed. The lights have been featured on Unsolved Mysteries, documented by National Geographic, and studied by multiple scientific teams without a definitive consensus.