Marfa is a little town in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas that is famous only for being the place where James Dean filmed his last movie, Giant, and the presence of a viewing platform that teems with people come dusk.For, when the sun goes down, garden chairs are set up and binoculars and cameras firmly fixed on the horizon as people hope they will experience one of the most famous unexplained phenomena in the US, the Marfa Mystery Lights. The lights have been described as glowing balls around 4m in diameter that bounce up and down, a little like the 'ping-pong balls' used to denote when you should sing when watching an old musical.BradSmyth, of Texas Economic Development & Tourism, had a 40min Marfa Lights experience three years ago.
He says: 'It was after dusk when three or four lights seemed to appear on the horizon.
They then started to move and glow brighter and changed from bright white to subtle yellows and pinks.'
The first recorded sighting
of the lights was in 1883 by the rancher Robert Reed Ellison in an area
of the desert called Mitchell Flat, but they occurred many years before
that in Native American folklore where they were described as 'stars
falling from the sky'.
Inevitably, in the 1950s,
American pop culture conspired to describe the lights as navigational
signals for flying saucers but, despite the recent debunkings of many
UFO myths, sightings persist.
A case ofgas
Explanations that have been
touted include suggestions that they are the result of plasma, swamp
gas and piezoelectric phenomena - where minor earthquakes cause an
accumulated charge in underground seams of quartz that is released into
the atmosphere as balls of lightning.
There have also been less
plausible explanations, such as them being the ghosts of the Spanish
conquistadores looking for gold. James Bunnell, a retired aerospace
engineer and author of the books Seeing Marfa Lights and Night Orbs,
has been studying the area for three years and has more than 60 images
of the lights taken by a surveillance camera that photographs Mitchell
Flat every 1.4 seconds. He believes the lights occur when high-energy
subatomic particles from the Van Allen radiation belts that surround
the Earth are drawn to the Earth's magnetic field. Theseparticles
would n......
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10,000 year old structure found in Canadian lake
Oldest skeleton in Americas found underwater ?
This iPod user rocks
10,000-year-old camel bones found in Arizona
Mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights
Grand Canyon's Glass Walkway to Open In March
Africans came with Columbus to New World
Mystery of Devils Hole
