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TRANSCRIPT
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Announcer: Welcome to “Marfa Mondays” with your host, award-winning travel and novelist, C.M. Mayo.
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C.M. Mayo: This is C.M. Mayo. Welcome to the seventh podcast in the 24 podcast series, “Marfa Mondays: Exploring Marfa, Texas & Environs,” which is apropos of a book I’m writing about the Big Bend region of Far West Texas. I’m recording this in July of 2012 so if you’re listening in the future the book may have a title and in fact may have been published, in which case I invite you visit my website, www.cmmayo.com, and read all about it and order your copy. I also invite you to visit my website any time to read all about my other books and about this podcasting project— and listen in to the podcasts.
Previous podcasts include a tour of rocks with Paul Graybeal, owner of Marfa’s magnet for rockhounds, Moonlight Gemstones; Cynthia McAlister with the Buzz on the Bees; an interview with Avram Dumitrescu, an artist in Alpine; curator Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony; wilderness guide and expert Charles Angell in the Big Bend; and, way back at the beginning, in January 2012, my introduction to this series and welcome to you.
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C.M. Mayo: If you’ve heard of Marfa, you’ve probably heard of the Marfa Lights, which are sometimes called the Marfa Ghost Lights.
If you haven’t heard of Marfa, let me fill you in on the basics. Named after a maid in a Dostoyevsky novel, it’s a speck of a town in the middle of the sweep of Far West Texas, part of an area the Spanish called the tierra despoblada, and, later, somewhat frighteningly, the Apachería. Even today with the railroad and the highway, and the recently internationally famous art scene, not a lot of people live in Marfa. But it seems almost everyone who does has seen and has a shiver-worthy story about the Marfa Lights.
[SCARY MUSIC STINGER]
I couldn’t do a podcast about the Marfa Lights without some scary music! Some of you might be wondering what I’m using to put these podcasts together. It’s Apple’s GarageBand, which has all sorts of neat stuff in it, like this:
[ANOTHER SCARY MUSIC STINGER]
And this:
[YET ANOTHER SCARY STINGER]
And this little sound loop called “Alien Communication”:
[ALIEN COMMUNICATION STINGER]
Okay, enough of that.
[DREAMY MUSIC]
When I first visited Marfa in the late 1990s, I made an arrow for the Marfa Lights viewing area, a pullout on the highway between Marfa and the neighboring town of Alpine. About 9 miles out of Marfa, it was just a parking area with, as I recall, a couple of sun-bleached picnic tables. There was an RV parked to one the side and standing on top of one of the picnic tables, a burly man in shorts and a T-shirt, his knees bent like a quarterback about to grab the football. There was no one else there. It was still light out, though the sky had paled and beyond the expanse of Mitchell Flat, the mountains to the south, the Chinatis, loomed a dusky purple. I don’t recall that man turning to look at me, but he must have heard my car pull up behind him, for as I opened the door, he pointed toward the mountains and began to shout:
“OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. OH …. MY… GOD!”
As I set my shoe on the dirt, I saw that it was surrounded by a scattering of something silvery: quarters. I have found many a penny on the sidewalk, and few dimes over the years, but this was several dollars worth of quarters. I gathered them up.
“OH MY GOD!” The man was bellowing. “OH MY GOD!!!”
I would have thought him barking mad except that, I too saw the lights and they were unlike anything I had ever seen. I climbed up on the other picnic table for a better view. There were a couple dozen little lights dancing on the flats and up in the foothills. They must have been miles away— maybe around the town of Shafter? Shafter is on the way to Presidio, the main town on the US-Mexico border in these parts.
They looked like car lights, but they were not just white and red, but green, blue, yellow— nor they did they move like car lights. Up they bounced! No helicopter I ever saw moved that fast, that straight, that high. Whimsically, the little lights shot left, then right, sliding horizontally, apparently along the ground, as if on greased rails. They blinked on, then off. Then on— irregularly, not like any mechanical signal. A yellow one went left; red up, blue blinked. Green stretched to divide like a piece taffy, in two. And just when I thought um, maybe those are car lights? Whoom, one would shoot up straight into the air, turn a different color, and blink off.
My sister had remained in the car, arms resolutely crossed. When I got back in, she harumphed. “Those are car lights.”
As we pulled out, that man had stopped shouting, but he was still standing on top of the picnic table, transfixed.
After dinner in Alpine, my sister and I drove back to Marfa in an ink-black night. We passed a few cars, a truck. Then what I thought was a motorcycle came toward us. A white, round light— a headlight, right? There was something odd about it, though, and then behind, in a line, came several others. A motorcycle convoy? At this hour? The parade of white lights swept by us and, I swear, I felt our car levitate.
Then it was dark again and all I could see were our car’s own headlamps casting forward onto the highway. That was when I realized what was so odd about those… motorcycles. Those lights had not cast light forward onto the pavement as a vehicle’s headlamp does. They were uniformly glowing orbs. A line of orbs moving along the pavement at what must have been at least 60 miles per hour.
“Did you see that?” I said to my sister.
“What,” she said.
“Those weird lights that just passed us.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
We ate the next night in Fort Davis. When I parked the car on the main street, I opened the door, and there, shining in the gutter, was another splash of quarters, several dollar’s worth. And on the way to Marfa that night, out in the middle of the desert, heading off at a right angle from the highway, I saw what I took to be the tailights of a truck. But suddenly those two red lights, whoom, flew apart and— I don’t know what, I just kept driving.
My sister didn’t see that, either.
Does this all sound like a tall tale? I’m telling you exactly what I remember experiencing; but whatever you think of that, I can assure you that if you go to Marfa and ask politely, you will find that eyewitness accounts of the Marfa Lights very much like my own and many, indeed, far stranger, abound.
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As a souvenir of that visit back in the late 90s, I bought a little stapled-spine book by Judith M. Brueske, PhD, The Marfa Lights: Being a Collection of First-Hand Accounts by People Who Have Seen the Lights Close-Up or in Unusual Circumstances and Related Material, second revised edition, published in 1988 by Ocotillo Enterprises. It turns out that the lights have been regularly witnessed and reported since the 19th century, mostly in the Marfa area, but throughout the desert, on the other side of the Rio Grande, south into Mexico and even as far northwest as New Mexico— though the ones I heard about there, in the mountains outside Alamogordo, from two different eye-witnesses, were red pinpricks that would float up close to one’s face and seemed to possess intelligence.
One of my favorite books about this region— I mean the greater Big Bend region of Far West Texas— is Pat Little Dog’s Border Healing Woman, about Jewel Babb. About the strange, haunting and yet oftentimes delightful story of a ranch wife who became a solitary goat herder and renowned healer, Border Healing Woman was recognized with the coveted Southwest Book Award when it was first published by the University of Texas Press in 1981. And oh, yes, Jewel Babb tells many stories about the lights. Just one of them, from page 100 of that book, I quote:
“One morning, I walked out with my goats. I was still close to the house when I looked up, and there was a bright object about as big as a football, lavender, yellow, orange, red, and green, bright as could be. And it was falling to the ground. It wasn’t falling straight down, but rather it was slanted and falling fast. When it did hit the ground, there was, it seemed, just a puff.”
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In the summer of 2011, I visited Marfa again, this time with my husband. Near twilight, supposedly the prime viewing time, we drove out to the Marfa Lights View Park, now a substantial and nicely painted southwest-style building with restrooms and a deck furnished with a row of telescopes aimed out over Mitchell Flat. We read the plaque, which was set into a plinth of stones:
MARFA MYSTERY LIGHTS
The Marfa Mystery Lights are visible on many clear nights between Marfa and Paisano Pass as one looks towards the Chinati Mountains. The lights may appear in various colors as they move about, split apart, melt together, disappear and reappear.
Robert Reed Ellison, a young cowboy, reported sighting the lights in 1883, he spotted them while tending a herd of cattle and wondered if they were Apache Indian campfires.
Apache Indians believed these eerie lights to be the stars dropping to the earth.
Many viewers have theories ranging from scientific to science fiction as they describe their ideas of aliens in UFO’s, ranch house lights, St. Elmo’s fire, or headlights from vehicles on US 67, the Presidio highway. Some beieve the lights are an electrostatic discharge, swamp gases, moonlight shining on veins of mica, of ghosts of the Conquistadors searching for gold.
As explanation as to why the lights cannot be located is an unusual phenomenon similar to a miracle, where atmospheric conditions produced by the interaction of cold and warm layers of air bend light so that it can be seen from afar, but not up close.
The mystery of these lights still remains unsolved.
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The air was warm enough to go without a sweater, but comfortable and the landscape, so vast and otherwordly, the way the sky blanched to lemon and to the southeast, the jagged profile of Cathedral mountain turned luscious shades of chocolate and lavender. To the south, the massive bulk of the Chinatis darkened to a plum-like purple. A few stars began to wink. We waited. I told my husband the eerie coincidence of finding those quarters, two days in a row, both times right by my foot when I opened the car door, and about that man on the table shouting, OH MY GOD.
More people arrived. A family tumbled out of their RV; a couple from a sedan; and from a battered truck, a woman who commenced to set up an expensive-looking video camera. We meandered up and down the deck. We peeked at the horizon through one of telescopes. We meandered some more. We looked again through another telescope. We made small talk. The woman with the camera said she’d captured some lights on film just last week. She said she had a relative who’d lived out there in a lonely ranch house and he’d seen blue lights, but he closed the curtains— didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know.
The air coolled. The mountains sharpened into near-black silhouhettes. In more than an hour, we had seen no lights other than the stars and one that was constant: a ranch light. My husband, he wanted to go to town and get dinner, so that was what we did.
I could see the scene at Thanksgiving: he and my sister rolling their eyes.
In the Marfa Book Company I found a copy of Hunting Marfa Lights by James Bunnel, which was published in 2009.
Two things about this book caught my attention: First, that the author, who grew up in Marfa, is an engineer with quite a resume. Among many other things, he was a member of the launch team for all manned Apollo launches from 1968 to 1973 and he retired from BAE Systems as Director of Mission Planning Systems for Air Force Programs. Second, Bunnel went after with the Marfa Lights with a rigorous methodology, superb equipment, and relentless determination.
He found that many of the lights could be explained, variously, by car lights, night mirages, light curtains, and what he called “chemical electromagnetic phenomena” which are, to quote him, “truly mysterious.”
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When I began my travels for this book project, back in the winter of this year, 2012, I asked many local people if they’d seen the lights. Charlie Angell, owner of Angell Expeditions, who has been my guide through some of the wilder areas of the Big Bend, told me, quote:
“Years ago I was watching the lights with my sister and as we left we saw one down a dirt road near the viewing area. I drove down the road towards it and it hovered away from
us, staying just above the road. It would stop when we stopped and then travel away from us if we drove towards it. It seemed to me to be like a rainbow, always there but you can’t get to it. I pursued it for a mile or so
and my sister got so panicked she insisted I stop chasing it, so that was it.”
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Charlie gave me a tour of Fort Leaton, outside of Presidio on the Rio Grande— for those of you without a map, that’s about an hour southwest of Marfa— and we were just about to leave the parking lot when the ranger there volunteered his story:
One time, very early in the morning, when he was driving a school bus from Marfa to Presidio, he saw in the rear view mirror that a big orb had appeared on the highway. It followed the bus, and then it came closer… And then it moved inside the bus.
And the children? I asked.
“They were all asleep.”
I said, “wow.” And I sure did wish I’d had the presence of mind to record that.
When I visited Chinati Hot Springs, a ways up the Rio Grande from Presidio, I did have my recorder handy and here’s what one of the caretakers, Diana Burbach, told me:
Diana Burbach: I saw them in Mexico. Horseback riding, coming back from that little village over there, we were on that road at night-time, and whew, yeah! I thought it was car lights coming at us. So I told the kids to hurry and scoot over. The guide told me, no wait, watch. The closer we got, they disappeared, and then coming up behind us, there they were! [LAUGHS]
C.M. Mayo [to listeners]: In the Marfa and Presidio County Museum, I asked Marfa native Berta Sánchez, had she seen the lights?
Berta Sanchez: I’ve seen them only in white. But there are other people, especially the people that come from, I would say, from Presidio or Ojinaga, that they have to go to Odessa for a doctor’s appointment—they come very early to get there at that time, and they go to Alpine— and they have seen them in red and green and yellow. But they don’t harm anything. They say it’s very scary because you see them, they come on like rolling, and they come close to your car or truck, whatever you’re driving, but nothing happens! It disappears! I don’t know what in the world it is. I sure don’t.
C.M. Mayo: Where did you see them?
Berta Sánchez: Over there.
C.M. Mayo: On the highway?
Berta Sánchez: Yes, coming from the mountain. And we would see them jumping up and down, for people to enjoy seeing them.
C.M. Mayo [to listeners]: And also in Marfa, when I was interviewing Paul Graybeal, owner of Moonlight Gemstones, for last month’s podcast, I asked him what lights had he seen?
Paul Graybeal: I’ve seen them fairly regular. Usually it’s coming back at night from Alpine. You can see them any time you get over the passes, where you’re high enough to see the radio tower. If they’re not every active you might not recognize them, you know, if you’ve one or two lights thery’re just setting out there, not moving. I’ve seen them when there are like 15 of them. I’ve seen them when they’re like extremely bright, you know, motion, you know. One will get bright and disappear, and then two will pop up. There’s a range of behavior they’re common to but they’re not always active.
C.M. Mayo: Have you seen them up close?
Paul Graybeal: One time we drove down Nopal Road, it’s a county road until you get to a gate, about two miles before the turn-off there’s a little sign with the ranches. But it is a county road so legally you can drive down it to the gate. That was the brightest. And what was the most amazing thing to me was, it seemed like it was like a streetlight up there but it did not illuminate the ground, it did not cause shadows. That is the strangest thing about them.
Another time I was driving back, it wasn’t way off there, it looked like it was real close, like you know, a block or two off the fence. But it was elongated, blue, it hovered like burning gas. And there again, it did not give off shadows. It was not a circle, it was stretched out, you know, like it was a gas.
C.M. Mayo [to listeners]: Recently, in November 2011, some members of the Laredo Paranormal Research Society came out and aimed lasers at the lights. The lights shrank and moved away. They got that on film, which you can watch on YouTube— google: “Marfa Lights Experiment, Laredo Paranormal Research Society.”
So what do I think the Marfa Lights are? At this point in time… an invitation to wonder.
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Announcer: Tune in for Marfa Mondays with your host C.M. Mayo at www.cmmayo.com/podcasts
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