Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I would appreciate the opinions of those of you with expertise hunting alternas (or anything else) in the area S-W of Marfa.

As a long-time herper, graybands are a particularly special animal to me; I have a pair of Blairs myself. But my real-life profession is in meteorology, and as such, I occasionally get to field questions about the infamous "Marfa lights." I searched the forums here and found nothing on this subject.

It occurs to me that some of the alleged sightings of "Marfa lights" might be the searchlights of dedicated herpers searching the terrain south and southwest of Marfa. Of the many lists of possible explanations out there, none that I've found addresses the activities of nighttime herpers. (As a scientist, I'm leaning toward car headlights on Highway 67 - which explains many sightings, but apparently not all of them. But searchlights moving around in the distant hills also could make for some strange sights, I suppose.)

Is this theory plausible? What do you think? Any insights would be most welcome.
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MichaelB

A friend and I were down there in mid-June and it struck me that one of the ranch-to-market roads that we collected on appeared to be located approximately where the lights are sometimes visible from the "observation area" on rt. 90. Probably a mere coincidence lol....

Brad Chambers

the marfa lights are very small and not usually in the direction of any roads. so unless there are a bunch of locals out there all night every night with lanterns, they aren't man-produced (you can see them pretty much every night, all night)

Troy

If you do some research you will find that the history of this phenomenon pre-dates the alterna craze. There must be some other explanation. This reminds me of a time in Oklahoma when I was doing my graduate studies. During many of the electrical storms multiple hues would glow in the nighttime sky when lightning occurred. Depending on which quadrant in the sky was involved, different colors would glow. Some were yellow; others were red, blue, or green. Being by nature very inquisitive, I called a local news station weatherman and asked him why the sky showed these colors during storms. He replied that he did'nt know. I called another forecaster, who shared with me the following theory: In chemistry classes one can do a wire loop test to find what element is in a chemical solution. The wire loop is passed over a flame. Strontium burns crimson, sodium burns yellow, copper burns green, etc. The man tlod me he felt there were different ions at different locations in the air. The predominating ion would burn more brightly and be visible as a glow associated with the bolts of lightning. That made perfect sense to me. Perhaps the Marfa Lights have some similar explanation. One wonders if any herpers have actually seen these lights. If the lights are reflections of the headlights of cars, and they are seen in an area where there are no roads, then we must be looking at light that is somehow being reflected and bent as would be the case with a prism. There are a lot of weird things out there that seem to have no easy explanations. Maybe others with more expereince can shed some light(pun intended)on this subject.