A Cowhand Spotted Mysterious Glowing Orbs Nearly 150 Years Ago. Scientists May Have Found the Source.

3 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:The “Marfa Lights” are an atmospheric phenomenon located in the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas outside the town of Marfa. The strange light display features orbs of varying colors that appear to dance along the horizon at dusk. Although two separate studies have analyzed the lights—concluding that the most likely origins are automobile headlights traveling along Highway 67 two miles away—the lights remain a quirky tourist attraction. In February 1945, an article appeared in the local newspaper, the San Angelo Times, titled “Ghost Light Appears in Marfa Area.” The phenomenon it described was strange—orbs of light (red, blue, and white) outside of the small western Texas town of Marfa that appeared to almost dance around in strange and unexpected ways. While this small article might’ve been the first written account of the lights, local legends say a West Texas cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison first saw the lights in 1883 while driving cattle through the Paisano Pass, twelve miles east of Martha.In the ensuing decades, the “Marfa Lights” (as they have become known) blossomed into one of the weirdest tourist attractions in Texas. Today, there’s even a Marfa Lights Viewing Area for passing motorists to watch the phenomenon at dusk. Over the years, every type of explanation has been adopted to try to explain these otherworldly orbs, including swamp gas, St. Elmo’s fire (a phenomenon inside an atmospheric electric field), igneous rocks that create a piezoelectric charge and, of course, aliens.But in recent years, scientists have taken a more pragmatic approach to understanding what exactly is going on along this stretch of Highway 90. In 2004, a group of students from the University of Texas at Dallas traveled to Marfa to examine the phenomenon for themselves. “We came up with a list of eight experiments,” Jeff Klenzing, one of the students, told Texas Monthly in 2006, “and three worked really well.”According to the magazine, the team used lasers, walkie-talkies, a traffic-volume monitoring box, a chase car, and high-speed video to get to the science of the matter, and the explanation was decidedly less than extraterrestrial. The most likely explanation for the lights was simply cars driving along nearby highway 67—when the team flashed car lights at the highway, the observed “Marfa Lights” could be seen at the viewing location two miles away. Four years later, another team from Texas State University performed spectroscopic experiments and came to a similar conclusion, stating that the most likely cause of the lights were automobile headlights or small fires in the sprawling Chihuahuan Desert.However, that doesn’t explain one key point of the Marfa Lights story—how did cowhands see the lights decades before the arrival of the automobile in West Texas? Texas Monthly tracked down a living descendant of Robert Ellison (the original source for the Marfa lights) and paged through the manuscript of his memoir, but neither primary source revealed a detailed description of the lights.“What I remember is there were lights down there they couldn’t explain. They thought they were Indian fires,” Ellison’s grandaughter, Rosemary Cox, told Texas Monthly. “They were just there all the time, part of the country. At least that’s what I remember him saying.”While one of Marfa’s mysteries might be solved, the small Texas town is quickly becoming the center of a new one. A December 2025 report by the University of Texas at Austin detailed that Marfa sits on top of a geothermal hotspot as the area contains some of the “hottest subsurface rock east of the Rocky Mountains,” according to Marfa Public Radio.So while the “Marfa Lights” might bring some people to the area who revel in the weird and the unexplained, it’s a secret that lies beneath the town that could bring real change.Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.