Tag: Marfa Lights

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Marfa Lights and Big Bend

What’s this? Marfa Lights and dragons in Big Bend, Texas? “Ghost lights” or “mystery lights” have been reported around the world, but where do dragons come in? This relates to the hypothesis that some legends of dragons come from non-extinct pterosaurs; the connection between Marfa Lights and pterosaurs has been a topic on blogs for months now.

How does all that relate to Big Bend National Park in Texas? Big Bend is a vaste wilderness area, more than adequate for hiding a group of nocturnal predators. Consider what one govenment site says about this national park:

Sometimes considered “three parks in one,” Big Bend includes mountain, desert, and river environments. An hour’s drive can take you from the banks of the Rio Grande to a mountain basin nearly a mile high. Here, you can explore one of the last remaining wild corners of the United States . . .

Let’s also consider some recent posts on the pterosaur connection to Marfa Lights (the town of Marfa is just north of Big Bend).

Marfa Lights and New Mexico Pterosaurs

This relates to the sighting of apparent pterosaurs in southern states, including Texas, Georgia, and New Mexico.

. . . Since reports of living pterosaurs come from north, east, and southeast (Cuba) of southwest Texas, we could use a view to the west of Texas; if sightings of live pterosaur come from almost everywhere surrounding Marfa, Texas, why could not pterosaurs fly at night in that isolated area?

Fourteen years ago, in [Socorro, New Mexico], me and a close friend . . . were hiking during the midday sun at [a] box canyon and something blocked the sun for a moment. We both looked up to see what did that and saw a large flying animal. . . . It had a 20-30 foot wingspan and was about the same length long. It had a long tail with [a] seeming spike at the end.

Are Marfa Lights Glowing Pterosaurs?

The original press release, “Unmasking a Flying Predator in Texas,” by Jonathan Whitcomb, gives an overview of the Marfa Lights, explaining why the local human residents have called them “dancing devils” and “ghosts.”

Getting back to Big Bend National Park, it includes more than 800,ooo acres and is visited by about a third of a million Americans each year. It has extreme contrasts in climate and habitat and a wonderful variety of plant and animal species. There are some caves, with some species of bats, but perhaps no reports yet of anything like dragons . . . not yet.

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Marfa Lights, More Car Headlights

Many explanations have been offered for Marfa Lights, including the conjecture about car headlights. That explanation takes up much space on the Wikipedia page for the mystery lights around Marfa, Texas. It deserves a brief reference.

A group from The Society of Physics Students at the University of Texas at Dallas spent four days investigating and recording lights observed southwest of the view park . . .

It seems that those students were looking specifically at the highway where car headlights are often seen from the Marfa Lights Viewing Platform (The state-erected park as a whole is better known as the “Marfa Lights Viewing Park”). Perhaps nobody argues against the assumption that many visitors to the park see car headlights and take those for “Marfa Lights.” But there is something much deeper here in this remote area of southwest Texas.

Wikipedia makes almost no mention of James Bunnell, a scientist who has spent years photographing and taking video of the more mysterious Marfa Lights, some of which he calls “CE-III mystery lights.” But it is that type of light that is nothing like the night mirages of car headlights that Bunnell acknowledges may also appear mysterious, at least to common visitors to the view park.

Getting back to those four days of observations by those university students, what if CE-III lights had appeared to the south or southeast of the view park? Would any of the students have noticed? Perhaps not, for they were deeply involved with car headlights on a highway to the southwest. More important, the truly mysterious flying lights that are labeled “CE-III” only appear a few times a year, with many weeks in a row without any sightings. Four days in a row of observations of car headlights does not even come close to a sufficient investigation, if the nature of the truly mysterious lights are to reveal any of their secrets.

Let’s look at this from another perspective. Many kinds of night light can appear mysterious in unusual circumstances. Look in your rear-view mirror while driving through a fog at night; a train following your car might cause a mysterious light. A shooting star larger than one you have ever seen, if you see it near Marfa, Texas, may appear mysterious enough for you to tie it to accounts of “Marfa Lights.” The point? Those university students did not prove that train lights and meteors near Marfa are actually night mirages of car headlights; those students did not prove that trains and meteors cannot exist near Marfa.

Non-fiction cryptozoology book "Live Pterosaurs in America" - third edition - back cover

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Marfa Lights – From Magnetosphere or Pterosaurs?

In James Bunnell’s book Hunting Marfa Lights, he examines the possibility that the truly mysterious Marfa Lights are related to the solar wind slamming into the earth’s magnetosphere. This idea may have come primarily from the spectacular light displays of Northern Lights and Southern Lights. A secondary factor in this conjecture relates to when the ML’s (mystery lights around Marfa, Texas) appear: only at night; and the night-side of the earth has an elongated portion of the magnetosphere. Nevertheless, there are problems.

On page 175 of Bunnell’s book, a detailed table shows ML events from late 2000 through early 2008. There is no coorelation with Solar Halos, and those major solar eruptions slam into the magnetosphere most violently. If the solar wind caused those mysterious Marfa Lights during those seven and a half years, there would surely be a relationship with Solar Halos; there was no relationship. The number of ML events on that table is thirty-three, making that examination statistically significant.

Bunnell recognized that problem but still hoped that the elongated magnetosphere on the night side might still have some relationship to the only-nocturnal ML’s. We need to remember that Mr. Bunnell is a rocket scientist (literally); he is not a biologist. In addition, he probably has had little or no exposure to eyewitness reports of glowing pterosaurs living in North America and in other parts of the world, especially in the southwest Pacific. Although the idea seems too extraordinary, if there were intelligent bioluminescent flying predators in southwest Texas, it would be natural for them to use their bioluminescence only at night, for the energy needed for such spectacular bright displays may be significant; why waste the energy in daylight, when it would be of little or no benefit for the organisms?

But there is another serious problem with the magnetosphere being related to the mysterious Marfa Lights that Bunnell calls “CE-III.” Why would a huge structure far above the earth cause the strange horizontal dancing, the splittings and rejoinings, and the fast horizontal flights that are at least somewhat similar to the speed of fast birds? There seems to be no relationship with those two vastly divergent phenomena.

Third edition of "Live Pterosaurs in America"
Live Pterosaurs in America, third edition, nonfiction
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Enlightening the Roadblock of Car Headlights for Marfa Lights

The major roadblock to objective investigations of the mystery lights called “Marfa Lights” is not the strangeness of the bioluminescent-pterosaur interpretation; it is the dogma of car headlights as the only explanation for any lights that might be called “mysterious” around Marfa, Texas.

From the blog post “Headlights and Hard Heads Knock Marfa Lights,” we read:

James Bunnell, in his book Hunting Marfa Lights, has examined, scientifically, the various lights around Marfa, lights that could be called “mysterious.” He has listed quite a few categories. The point is that car headlights, made mysterious by night-mirage atmospheric conditions, are only one type of mystery light near Marfa. Other classifications of what Bunnell calls “ML” (mystery lights) are seen where there are no highways and even no roads. Some ML have combustion-like properties (Bunnell is literally a rocket scientist), very unlike car headlights . . .

Mr. Bunnell, years ago, installed automatic cameras on the lands where ranchers allowed it, photographing many of the Marfa Lights that flew over bushes (not on any highway). Detailed scientific analysis of those non-headlights proved them to be very different, showing things as strange as combustion-like properties, with burn-out and re-combustion during flights. Mr. Bunnell knows what he is talking about, being a rocket scientist who assisted all the Apollo missions that put humans on the moon several times.