Mysterious lights have been sighted near Marfa, in the Trans-Pecos, for more than 100 years. Reports have come from farmers, ranchers, police officers, scientists and tourists, some of whom travel to the area hoping to glimpse this curious local attraction.

Although the lights are closely associated with the town of Marfa, they have been sighted throughout the flats and mountainous regions of the Trans-Pecos and on both sides of the Rio Grande. Most of those who say they have seen them describe the experience more as an encounter than as a mere sighting.

Early in 1995, Vern Campbell of Alpine went looking for the Marfa Lights near Paisano Pass, between Marfa and Alpine. He reports that he wasn't there for long before a glowing white orb appeared in the distance. According to Campbell, the light moved slowly across the Mitchell Plateau, then attached itself to a high-tension power line.

The weird, glowing mass cruised within 50 yards of the astonished witness, illuminating the ground for a radius of about 100 feet. It continued along the wire for another tenth of a mile, then gently detached itself, drifting slowly toward the low hills south of the pass.

"The lights usually travel in twos and threes," says Campbell, who first sighted the phenomenon in 1974. "It's hard to tell how big they are from a distance, but close-up they appear to be about three feet in diameter with colors fluctuating between green, yellow, red and blue."

Some witnesses personify the Marfa Lights, using words like "playful," "curious," and "mischievous" to describe them. A few, such as Ofelia Ward of Alpine, say they have experienced the darker side of this personality. Late one evening in the mid-1980s, Ward was traveling down Highway 90 between Marfa and Alpine when she felt the hairs suddenly rise up on the back of her neck. Overcome with the impression that she was not alone, she turned around to look at the back seat of the car. It was unoccupied, but the nasty sensation remained with her nevertheless. Still feeling uncomfortable, Ward tried to concentrate on her driving. As she neared Alpine, she says that she was distracted by the sight of a flickering object.

"A red-orange fireball was in the pasture that ran along the road," Ward remembers. "It was more than 100 feet from the car, but kept pace with it, even though I was really scared by then and was driving more than 90 miles an hour. The fireball didn't break off until I reached the Santa Fe Railroad Pass, 13 miles outside of Alpine. That was one journey I'll never forget!"

According to Dennis William Hauck, author of an encyclopedic work entitled The National Directory of Haunted Places, the lights have been seen for more than 150 years. Dr. Judith M. Brueske-Plimmer has been fascinated with these sightings and is the author of a book The Marfa Lights, and also editor/publisher of The Desert Candle, a quarterly newspaper in Alpine — a publication in which the Marfa Lights often make headlines. Brueske-Plimmer says the lights first were reported in the 1840s by a band of Mexican travelers en route to San Antonio.

Roughly 40 years later, they were spotted a second time by Robert Ellison, as he drove cattle over the Paisano Pass east of Marfa. After hearing about the phenomenon for most of his life, Ellison's son-in-law, Lee Plumbley, set out to find the lights; they found him in 1921, very near the place where Ellison had first observed them in 1883.

The lights became particularly active during World War II. Fearful that they might be enemy aircraft, the Army Air Corps sent pilots to Marfa. The outcome of their expedition is described by San Francisco-based journalist W. Haden Blackman in The Field Guide to North American Monsters. According to Blackman, the lights defiantly buzzed the airplanes. The Corps responded by dropping flour bombs, hoping to "brand" the source of the illumination. The bags passed through the lights, of course, spattering flour across the landscape. Longtime light-watcher Charlotte Allen of Alpine says she has enjoyed many happy encounters with the Marfa mystery, but none so interesting as the one she had in 1991.

"We were driving down the road when the lights suddenly appeared about 200 feet overhead," she remembers. "I was with my husband and a 10-year-old boy named Joe Clark, a distant relative from Houston. The lights were lined up in an arch, and they were hovering soundlessly over the car. Some of them were stationary, some were bobbing. When they disappeared, they left long shafts of radiant particles behind."

Scientific investigators are quick to attribute the lights to static electricity or natural gas. The New Handbook of Texas says that the most plausible explanation is that they are "caused by an atmospheric condition produced by the interaction of cold and warm layers of air that bend light so that it is seen from a distance but not up close."

Independent researcher and freelance computer design engineer Edson C. Hendricks advances a different, and more complex, theory.

A skeptic at first, Hendricks was convinced of the reality of the phenomenon on his first night in Marfa when, he says, he saw not one light, but a constellation. They performed aerial acrobatics, and at the climax of the performance, one light zigzagged toward the horizon before his astonished eyes. "While I'm not willing or able to explain this with conviction, I can offer some informed speculation," Hendricks says.

"My hunch is that there are electrical discharges occurring underground at Marfa," Hendricks says. "Solar winds interact with earth's magnetic field. Under the right conditions, they can create currents that run along the surface of the earth.

"These currents can do weird things. In West Texas they may create underground lightning, which gives rise to the Marfa Lights," Hendricks says. Brueske-Plimmer is not sure what the lights are, but she has no doubt — as some people do — that they are actually out there.

"While it is possible to ‘explain away' some of the sightings as car lights or airplane lights distorted by atmospheric conditions, observer error, and the like," Brueske-Plimmer says, "it is not possible to do this with other reports. It is undeniable that the mysterious lights exist, and that people are seeing them."