In Defense of the Marfa Lights

By James Bunnell

These days, Marfa, Texas, is a mecca for art and artists. But Mitchell Flat, a vast stretch of ranch land to the east of Marfa, is a much older mecca, not for art, but for lights. Since the 19th century, reports of mysterious or unexplained lights have intrigued people who live in this west Texas region. Some visitors (and there are many) declare distant, moving lights to be "mysterious" while more skeptical visitors may tell you that what they saw were ranch lights and vehicle lights. Who is right? What are these light? The state of Texas created a roadside park for the many curious travelers and locals who stand at night looking, looking. There have been countless magazine articles, newspaper accounts, books, and television programs that raise the question but never quite answer it. A team of scientists, state of the art equipment, and time (years) might do it. But at this point in time, the "answer" boils down not to a concrete, singular fact, but rather to a choice between two camps. Author James Bunnell is squarely in the camp that rejects the "headlights" theory and pushes for more scientific investigation because he believes the lights are rare but unusual, natural phenomena that have much to tell us about our own Earth. Unlike the headlight theorists, some of whom have never visited Marfa or Mitchell Flat. Bunnell backs up his conclusions about the lights with ten years of first hand observations, photographs of many hundreds of lights from multiple automatic night cameras, and a unique base of his own of his own photographic evidence taken by him, onsite, in real time. "A VERY SMALL NUMBER of these lights are indeed mysterious natural phenomena."

A retired aerospace engineer, Bunnell has no quarrel with light gazers who have come to Mitchell Flat, have seen lights, and declared them to be headlights. He understands why: Explainable lights heavily outnumber mysterious lights. A much different matter are those who did not come to Marfa, who question him at length over a serious of months and then use, without permission, his copyrighted photographs and data to "prove" that "mysterious lights" do not exist. These are the people who made this book necessary. This book is a closer look at what they did, and what James Bunnell did. You choose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098367091

Book preview

Part 1

Demise of the Marfa Lights has been greatly exaggerated…

In the summer of 2020, Manuel Aymerich and V.J. Ballester Olmos published an article on the internet and are now selling a book version in Europe titled The Marfa Lights / Examining the Photographic Evidence (2003-2007). The authors have published, without my permission, copyrighted pictures from my websites and two of my books with the intent of proving that the Marfa Lights do not exist. Using the Google Earth app and photographic overlay software, they have produced an overwhelming number of calculations and graphs. and, from a distance, their work appears impressive. If you read more thoroughly, however, you will see (through all the if’s, and’s, and but’s) that it is a mighty and strained effort to push forward a "Vehicle Headlights (VHL) Theory." If their readers accept that theory, they are accepting a multitude of assumptions that Aymerich and Olmos have chosen to make to get the outcomes they want (i.e., put lights on roads). That does not sound much like a scientific endeavor, does it? It is not. It is two UFO debunkers writing for