MANUEL BORRAZ AYMERICH & VICENTE-JUAN BALLESTER OLMOS THE MARFA LIGHTS Examining the Photographic Evidence (2003-2007) FOTOCAT Report #8 The authors, Barcelona & Valencia (Spain), 2020 DEDICATION To Avideh Zakhor Manuel Borraz Aymerich Para Mara Asuncin, mi amor de siempre Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos All diagrams, graphs, simulations, composite pictures, and picture correlations are Manuel Borraz TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 6 EVENTS ANALYZED Event dated February 19, 2003, 20:20 hours (CST) 19 Event dated May 7, 2003, 21:55:34 hours (CDT) 26 Event dated May 7, 2003, 3min, 16sec later 31 Event dated May 7, 2003, 3min, 40sec later 34 Event dated May 7, 2003, final phase 39 Event dated May 8, 2003, 22:15:55 hours (CDT) 49 Event dated May 8, 2003, 3 min, 43sec later 58 Event dated May 8, 2004, 21:04:31 hours (CDT) 88 Event dated May 8, 2004, >21:04:31 hours (CDT) 89 CONCLUSIONS A word on classic Marfa Lights 104 Summary of results 107 Conclusions 121 APPENDIX 1: METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES Geographical checks using Google Earth 124 Astronomical checks using Stellarium 132 Final remarks 135 APPENDIX 2: COMMENTS ON BUNNELLS RESPONSE 137 APPENDIX 3: RECENT CASES REVIEWED Introductory notes 150 Event dated August 11, 2006 151 Event dated October 19, 2006 154 Event dated July 23, 2007 160 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 170 OTHER FOTOCAT REPORTS RELEASED 175 INTRODUCTION We can find chronicles on the recurrent apparition of mystery lights in many parts of the world going back a long time. Serious and less serious literature on this topic abounds, and we feel that local events should be investigated by examining local conditions and field characteristics in depth, as probably the origin of every phenomenon is different according to the place where it originates. A non- comprehensive listing of some of these regular phenomena would include, for example, the Hessdalen phenomenon of Norway ( Notes 1-4), the Brown Mountain lights of North Carolina ( Notes 5-7), the annual Naga fireballs of the Mekong River, Thailand ( Notes 8-10), the Mafasca light of Fuerteventura, Canary Islands ( Notes 11-14), the ghost lights of Silver Cliff, Colorado (Note 15), the Corps-Candles of Wales ( Notes 16-17), the Min Min lights near Boulia, Australia Notes 18-21), the Spook light of Hornet, Missouri (Notes 22-24), the Spook light of Long Valley, New Jersey ( Notes 25-27), and the Paulding light of Michigan Notes 28-29). As a matter of fact, a researcher has produced a list of 30 different locations for clusters of mystery lights in North America alone, in 20 U.S. States and 2 Canadian provinces (Note 30). Over the years, reports of the display of a phenomenon called Marfa Lights have been studied by both amateurs and academics. The earliest reported sighting of a mysterious light on the Marfa plain, Texas, was made by Robert Reed Ellison and dates as far back as 1883, yet no first-hand account exists, only a story relayed by some members of his family. Ellison, then a 16-year-old cowboy, was herding cattle through Paisano Pass in March of 1883, to visit his father, when he saw lights in the distance that he took for Indian campfires, although no traces were found later. In 1937, Ellison described this trip in his memoirs. As scholars Robert and Judy Wagers recount (Note 31), he noted that on the first night that he camped on the Marfa plain a little while after night came, a full moon rose up and illuminated the mountains south of him. He also remarked that the mountains seemed to have moved closer to him. Except for this illusionprobably caused by an atmospheric refraction phenomenon (looming), according to the Wagers Ellison made no reference to seeing any mysterious lights at all. One of the problems of Marfa Lightsakin to UFO phenomenais to distinguish the authentic reports (i.e., those which appear to be inexplicable, if any) from the usual mistakes. But, unlike UFO sightings, known to be mostly caused by a wide array of misinterpreted stimuli, the most stable pattern in MLs is their occurrence at ground level in the form of a very distant luminous spot moving straight, thus appearing as a bright linear track in photographic time-exposures. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Marfa Lights are repeatedly explained away as lights of vehicles driving on local The scope of the present work does not include showcasing a comprehensive review of the literature. Not pretending to be exhaustive, however, we will next list a few papers, articles, web sites and books that have covered this topic as a research assignment, noting a summary of their findings, as an added value for the interested reader. In March 1975, Don Witt, physics professor at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, coordinated a group of physics students, community members, local pilots, radio amateurs and a few outside professionals to locate the lights source. The monumental effort...was positively unable to form any sort of conclusion [other than]...artificial lights from area ranches or automobile headlights merely passing behind unseen obstructions along distant Highway 67 ( In 1976, Elton Miles, professor of English at Sul Ross State University, published a celebrated book on the folklore of the Texan Big Bend region. One chapter was devoted to this type of local occurrence, recounting old stories where reports are mixed with cowboy and Indians mythology. Miles writes: The appeal of the unknown in these lights is strong enough to arouse sensible men to elaborate an expensive investigative action in their determination to conquer the mystery of the Marfa Lights and lay bare their natural disposition (Note 33). McDonald Observatory, located 40 miles from Marfa, is a research unit of The University of Texas at Austin. In the June 1987 issue of its bulletin StarDate, contributing editor Diana Hadley reviewed the ML reports and arrived at this conclusion: Headlights of cars on roads south of the plains southwest of Marfa are normally not visible. However, when a layer of cold air forms over the southwest plains, the headlight beams are bent back toward the earth and thus visible to observers on Highway 67 [the shared stretch of highways 67 and 90] and Mitchell Mesa [she probably meant Mitchell Flat] east of Marfa. Furthermore, the lights appear to be coming from the sky and will move around and change, both because the properties of the boundary layer are changing and because the cars are moving (Note 34). This explanation was criticized on the grounds that, in normal conditions, automobile headlights are decidedly and easily visible on Highway 67 south of Marfa between Marfa and Shafter Pass (Note 35). In 1989, Unsolved Mysteries, the well-known TV series on crime, drama, and mystery, hosted by Robert Stack, featured an episode on the Marfa ghost lights. To that purpose, scientists from McDonald Observatory and Sul Ross State University were called to examine the lights for the program, headed by astronomer Edwin Barker, chemistry professor Avinash Rangra and a geologist. As expected for a TV show, the phenomenon remained not solved. Intriguingly, one midnight, the teams night-viewing equipment recorded in the middle of Mitchell Flat a globe of light which disappeared, came back, and faded again. Observers were certain the light did not come from a man-made source (Note 32). In recent correspondence, Dr. Barker added: "I am certain that the light was from the rotating headlamp of a passing train. Mysteries had to remain Unsolved" (Note 60). The same year, well-known Texan geologist and naturalist Judith Brueske presented a compilation of first-hand Marfa Lights reports in a 50-page publication that soon became essential reading for students of this phenomenon (Note 36). Also, in 1989, Professor Yoshi-Hiko Ohtsuki, a Japanese plasma physicist at Tokyo's Waseda University, paid his first visit to Marfa. Two years later, Ohtsuki would become well known for reporting in Nature, with H. Ofuruton, the first successful production of something akin to ball lightning in the laboratory. He believed that ball lightning had much in common with mystery lights like those of Marfa and, in general, with the vast majority of UFOs. Ultra-sensitive video cameras kept a 24-hours a day vigil, succeeding in capturing a 10-second image of an unidentified light that was long and thin like a string at first and shortened into a ball afterward. Ohtsuki's study was documented by the television crew of The Chase, a Japanese TV show somewhat similar to the American program Unsolved Mysteries (Notes 61-62). Ohtsuki returned to Marfa in the summer of 1992 with a team of researchers, a great deal of measuring and recording equipment, and a Buddhist priest, who performed some rituals. They were joined by Edson Hendricks, a San Diego engineer expert in sferics (electromagnetic pulses caused by atmospheric phenomena). The popular TV series Sightings ran a 10-minute feature on the Marfa lights, covering the investigation and including some footage of dancing multicolored lights captured on September 1 by its own production crew ( Between March 6-15, 1994, British earth-lights searcher Paul Devereux and US physicist (and parapsychologist) Hal Puthoff visited the area under the auspices of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories. Devereux summarized the findings of the expedition as follows: We were eventually able to dismiss a number of luminous effects popularly assumed to be Marfa Lights: occasional mirage effects can raise lights normally hidden over the horizon into visibility, sometime reproducing the same lights in tiers, and lights of vehicles 30 miles or more away on the Marfa-Presidio road are so distorted that they can appear anomalous. We also determined that lights on vehicles negotiating rough tracks belonging to isolated ranches on the undulating desert- scrub area known as Mitchell Flat can look like mysterious lights skimming the ground, fusing, and parting. Nevertheless, interviews with local witnesses convinced us that genuine anomalous lights probably did sporadically appear in the vast region ( In 1999, physics teacher Steve Simpson and a group of physics students from Lexington High School (Illinois) spent their spring break at Marfa to conduct on-site experiments with a spectrometer to analyze the frequencies of the sighted lights, balloons equipped with instruments to measure temperature inversions (a failed experiment), and, naturally, visual observation and photographic recording. Distant, mysterious lights were seen to appear and disappear, but the team concluded that the on-off period checked correlated with automobile lights. They tested the theory by driving tens of miles where the lights were observed, and flashing lights regularly to the crew standing at the viewing area. They found out that the MLsvisible toward the southwest in a published time exposurewere only passing headlights weaving in and out of the mountains ( Note 37). In a longer reference, directly provided by Simpsons Physics Class, they summed up their conclusions in a very sincere way: We scientifically proved with a number of experiments that the Marfa Lights we saw were indeed only headlights coming from a distant road in the mountains. We were told, however, that the Marfa Lights we saw were not the only recorded type of them seen. It is said that there have been mysterious lights seen in the horizon to the left of the headlights that are unexplainable On August 25, 2000, Alto Technology Resources, Inc., a Houston-based industry specialized in providing hyperspectral remote-sensing imaging, performed a one- day airborne field work to study the MLs. One of their major findings follows: We combined the computer-generated soil distribution with the US Geological Survey topographic maps and Digital Elevation Models (DEM) that allowed us to view the soils and the topography as they would be seen from the Marfa Lights Observation Site. From our analysis, we believe that car headlights shining in the direction of the Observation Site, reflected along the concave surface of soil alongside of Highway 67, are the source of the Lights. The highly reflective soil acts as a mirrored surface that creates the observed phenomena ( Note 39). As noted in the abstract of an article by the main writer, published by Weatherford Laboratories (Houston, Texas): Light behavior such as blinking, splitting, combining, unusual movements, dimming and gaining brightness, have confounded researchers for fifty years. While ground video recorded the Lights, the airborne hyperspectral (as well as the crew) saw nothing from above. The only mechanism capable of this is reflection along a curved surface ( The Alto Technology hypothesis (that, admittedly, had not been tested, and was simply a first pass at interpreting a new data set) deserved, however, a well- founded criticism: Their ground person could see car lights turning on and off and varying in intensity but from the airplane they looked like normal car lights. Alto Technology failed to understand that the variable intensity and On and Off states of car lights observed from the View Park were due to terrain obstructions and changes in road direction. They incorrectly concluded that what their ground observer was seeing was reflected car lights when he was actually seeing car lights directly. It was a misunderstanding of facts leading to incorrect conclusions concerning visible automobile traffic on Highway 67 ( Let us introduce now a remark in passing. It is nothing new how popular culture (groundless or not) materializes in the form of public attractions. One of the best- known examples is Roswell, New Mexico, of flying saucer crash myth fame. In 2001, the State of Texas installed a roadside rest area designed as a viewing station for light-hunting visitors, the Marfa Lights Viewing Center (MLVC), a pavilion located 9 miles east of the town, on the south side of U.S. Highway 67/90, overlooking Mitchell Flat, at coordinates 30.0, 16.5 N, 103.0, 53.1 W. This tourist attraction expanded a previous pull-off already used as an observation area, located by the old airfield. In 2001, NASA astronomer Sten Odenwald created a web resource on ghost lights, trying to establish indisputable facts and common features ( Note 30). In the extensive section dedicated to the Marfa lights, he indicated: car lights on distant roadways account for virtually all of the sightings from the Marfa Lights Visitor Center, but local residents know about these and say that the true Marfa Lights are not these, but more mysterious and very rare lights seen on the flatlands Surprised by the long distances at which the lights of vehicles on Highway 67 were seen, Odenwald postulated some kind of atmospheric amplification related to the so-called highway mirages caused by temperature gradients above a heated roadway. He did a preliminary study showing very shallow angles between the road surface and the line-of-sight from the Viewing Area, compatible with his proposed scenario. He also provided plots of the viewing angle and the headlight angle along the path of Highway 67 to illustrate their effects on the angular speed and the brightness of the observed lights ( Another publication on this subject addressed primarily to a scientific audience was released in December 2005 by The Society of Physics Students at the University of Texas at Dallas. Experiments consisted of obtaining video records of the light patterns, making U.S. Highway 67 traffic volume measurements, and sending a chase team to the highway in order to determine the location of any mystery light relative to the chase car as both were observed from the viewing area. Thisextremely limitedwork concluded that all of the mystery lights observed by this group on the nights of 11 and 13 May 2005 can be reliably attributed to automobile headlights traveling along US 67 between Marfa and Presidio, Texas ( Out of the innumerable list of articles on MLs, we are selecting here just a minor sample of works made under scientific criteria or sources thought to be complete and balanced. In 2006, Michael Hall published an essay in a Texas magazine with little-known details of the history of the phenomenon, local ranchers sightings (including two from notorious Kerr Mitchell), and even an episode involving Venus In June 2008, Weatherwise, a popular science and technology magazine covering weather and climate, released an article on the subject that focused on the car headlights on Route 67 as the source of the ghostly lights. The author, a corresponding editor of the journal, concluded that a number of phenomena can be at the root of the mystery...from simple refraction to a variety of mirages. They would explain the shimmering and strange behavior of the lights (blooming, shrinking, jumping, splitting into two...), observed by the author himself ( Although the Route 67 traffic is a widely accepted explanation for the lights seen southwest of the Marfa Lights Viewing Center, controversy remains concerning rarer lights seen in other directions, sometimes referred to as the genuine Marfa Lights. In May and June 2008, members of the Texas State University conducted a 20-night field investigation using a portable telescope and a CCD-array spectrometer, but no objects were sighted that met the criteria for genuine Marfa lights. In their paper, published in the American Journal of Physics the following Note 45), they concluded that a much more extended effort would be required due to the phenomenons low frequency of occurrence. As they pointed out, such objects had been recorded previously on about only 0.9% of the total number of nights monitored with a camera system by James Bunnell between November 2000 and May 2008. Incidentally, Bunnell is to become a central part of the present report, as will soon be evident. Probably the single more outstanding reference in the study of the Marfa Lights is the book published in 2013 by Robert and Judy Wagers (Note 31). The authors have a distinguished career in electronics engineering