Marfa lights

The Marfa lights are an optical phenomenon regularly reported near Marfa, Texas, described as orbs of light, usually yellow orange but sometimes green, blue, or red, that vary in brightness, move or hold still, and occasionally appear to split or merge, hovering above the desert scrub below the mesas in the background. The first recorded sighting was in 1883, when a cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison reported flickering lights while driving cattle through Paisano Pass, and settlers who investigated at the time found no campfires or settlements to explain them; the lights reached wider public attention through a 1957 magazine article, and later monitoring recorded roughly 9.5 sightings a year over about 5.25 nights annually. Research between 2000 and 2008 attributed most sightings to automobile headlights distorted by warm desert air, with a 2004 University of Texas at Dallas study finding that the lights visible from the viewing platform tracked traffic on the nearby highway, though a 2008 Texas State University spectroscopic study suggested some sightings remain unexplained.