Seeing the light
David Clarke looks at a painstaking study analysing a mysterious phenomenon
The Marfa Lights
Examining the Photographic Evidence (2003-2007)
Manuel Borraz Aymerich & Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos
FOTOCAT Report #8, July 2020
https://www.academia.edu/43589341/THE_MARFA_LIGHTS_Examining_the_Photographic_Evidence_2003_2007
Mystery lights or “ghost lights” that haunt specific landscapes are a familiar motif in supernatural folklore. Possibly the best known are the Marfa Lights that are a tourist attraction for the small West Texas town nestled in a desert-mountain region near the Mexican border. In 2001 a “viewing station” was installed nine miles east of Marfa on Highway 90, that provides a year-round observation point over an area of desert scrubland called Mitchell Flat. From here mysterious lights can regularly be seen flitting below the Chinati Mountains, 60 miles (96km) away to the south west.
The most popular explanation is headlights of vehicles travelling along the US Route 67 between Marfa and Presidio. Past investigations by scientists and researchers, including FT’s own Paul Devereux, confirmed many observations could be traced to distant vehicular headlights moving along undulating desert roads. From the viewing station the Marfa lights appear like “mysterious lights skimming the ground, fusing, and parting”.
Since the 1980s dozens of photographs and moving footage of the lights have featured on shows like Unsolved Mysteries. Retired aerospace engineer James Bunnell captured these phenomena on film, collating his findings in a series of illustrated books. From 2003 he set up monitoring stations equipped with cameras near the viewing station. He is confident he can separate the “genuine” lights from the regularly misidentified vehicle headlights. His work piqued the interest of Manuel Aymerich and veteran Spanish ufologist Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos who operate FOTOCAT, a worldwide cataloguing project that has some 12,000 UAP images on its database.
As in ufology, a stubborn residue of Marfa light experiences resist explanation. These fall into two categories: anecdotal stories and the hard evidence captured on film. The Spanish team concentrated their attention on the best evidence, obtained from 2003 to 2007, that Bunnell believes represents a type of unknown natural phenomenon new to science. The FOTOCAT project scrutinised 17 of Burrell’s most impressive photographs using the Google Earth Photo Overlay tool that allowed them to produce a 3D representation of the Marfa landscape. After a year of painstaking analysis they identified errors in the information Bunnell had used in his calculations. They found the simplest explanation was correct. The Marfa lights – even the so-called “genuine” unexplained cases – are vehicle lights: “in every single event when geographical verification has been possible (assisted by Google Earth) the photographed luminous trails match with local roads”.
The fully illustrated 174page report is a classic example of what tends to happen when a rigorous scientific methodology is applied to extraordinary “evidence” of the type often associated with UAPs. The FOTOCAT report can be downloaded free from Academia.edu, but there are plans for a full-colour print edition from UPIAR, an Italian press, available via Amazon.