The Marfa Lights: Headlights, Mirages and a Riddle the Desert Won't Quite Surrender

2026-07-24 · Enigmatic Places · 7 min read

One evening in 1883, a sixteen-year-old cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison was driving cattle through Paisano Pass, in the high, dry country of far west Texas, when he noticed a flicker of light out in the dusk. He took it for the campfires of Apaches and said so. Riders went out to look. They found no ashes, no embers, no ring of stones, no trace of a camp of any kind. The next night the light came back, and the night after that. By 1885 other settlers in the basin, among them the Humphreys family, were reporting much the same thing. Ellison's sighting is the oldest attached to the phenomenon that would later be called the Marfa Lights, and it carries one important qualification: he never wrote it down. His account reached paper only decades later, carried there by family recollection.

For the seventy years after Ellison, the record is entirely oral: ranchers, soldiers, and stories told at the family table. During the Second World War, pilots training at the nearby Marfa Army Airfield are said to have searched for the lights from the air and come back with nothing. The first known account of the lights to appear in print arrived only in July 1957, in the magazine Coronet. In 1976 the folklorist Elton Miles gathered nineteenth-century recollections and a rancher's photograph into his book Tales of the Big Bend. Both were memory reaching backward rather than contemporary record. No dated nineteenth-century document describing the lights is known to survive.

Reader comments (0)