New Book on Marfa Lights -- They ARE Only 'Car Headlights'

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT -THE MARFA LIGHTS

Examining the Photographic Evidence (2003-2007)

By Manuel Borraz & V.J. Ballester Olmos

(July 2020)

We are pleased to announce the release of a book dedicated to the scientific analysis of photographs of the so-called “Marfa Lights,” an allegedly anomalous phenomenon recurrently observed in Marfa, Texas.

Between 2003 and 2007, seven series of high-quality photographs were taken in the area, claimed to be genuine examples of close-to-the-ground lights that defy conventional explanation. They were not a simple subset of examples of MLs, but the best and most significant photographs ever achieved of the phenomenon.

Over two years, taking an almost forensic approach, we have analyzed this evidence and come to firm conclusions that establish the true nature of the lights beyond any reasonable doubt. We are convinced that the corollary applied to the images and events discussed can be justifiably extended to the rest of the Marfa “mystery lights.”

Using advanced astronomical and geographic software, we have developed a specific methodology for analyzing this type of photographic evidence, which other researchers can apply to identify similar images of “mystery lights” from other parts of the world.

We are proud of the reaction that scientists from a wide range of disciplines have had to our work, as the quotations in the attachment show.

This work is FOTOCAT Report #8 in a series of monographs produced by the FOTOCAT project. It contains 174 pages, 102 illustrations and 70 references. This monograph is available free of charge through the following link:

www.academia.edu...

Advanced praise received from early reviewers

This research is unique and a major contribution to identifying the causes of the Marfa lights using models of cars traveling on distant highways and roads from across the Marfa plateau. It is amazing just how well the models replicate the 'behavior' of nearly, and likely, all of the known observations of this phenomenon. In the end, car headlights combined with the mirage phenomenon are all that seem needed to once-and-for-all settle the many disputes about the origins of the Marfa Lights. Kudos to the investigators for offering this new and compelling evidence!
Dr. Sten Odenwald, Astronomer, NASA Space Science Education Consortium

An excellent scientific investigation. The depths of your analyses are remarkable.
Dr. Robert Wagers, co-author of Mysteries of the Marfa Lights Revealed, USA

A careful and painstaking investigation. You have done a good job of establishing the main point - that the Marfa Lights are just vehicle headlights. A job well done!
Dr. Andrew T. Young, Adjunct Professor of Astronomy, San Diego State University, USA

The authors have carried out a very thorough and scrupulous analysis. They managed to prove that Marfa Lights can be explained in the context of well-known ideas about the propagation of light emitted by car headlights. The techniques used by the authors of the book may also be useful for studying the phenomenon of ball lightning.
Dr. Anatoly I. Nikitin, Secretary of the International Committee of Ball Lightning, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Russia

It is a fascinating project; you and your colleague have obviously put a lot of time and careful thought into it… your methodology seems sound and I find your report persuasive.
Dr. Peter A. Sturrock, emeritus Director of the Center for Space Science and Astrophysics, Stanford University, USA

Great work. Not a refutation but a full reanalysis. Overwhelming and solid conclusions.
Julio Plaza del Olmo, physicist and investigator, Spain

You have criticized the estimations of height using a reasonable qualitative guess (atmospheric refraction of the image), and for the velocity using a quantitatively better measure of time (from star image tracks in the observations). I think that your analysis as far as it goes is good.
Dr. John Abrahamson, Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

A work of great precision and a very useful job.
Dr. Sergey Chernouss, Polar Geophysical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia

The report is perfectly argued and remarkably carried out. The visual appearance and behavior of the lights is incoherent with a possible luminous phenomenon of natural origin and related to electricity or natural magnetism.
Dr. Raymond Piccoli, Director of the Laboratoire de Recherche sur la Foudre, France

Having plowed the field of anomalous aerial phenomena for 45 years myself, I would rank this essay among the dozen or so best documented and most thoroughly researched studies on the subject ever published. The science is outstanding and the arguments solid.
Wim van Utrecht, Caelestia Project, Belgium

I fully agree with the methodology you explained. I consider that this work can be used as an example of scientific method. I have always considered Marfa lights with no strangeness and without any interest, and you have made a lot of good work in order to dismiss the way believers perceive facts .
Dr. Claude Poher, former Space Research Engineer in CNES, creator of GEPAN in 1977 (SEPRA/GEIPAN), Quantum Gravitation researcher, France

Your book is a detailed and painstaking work that covers a comprehensive overview of existing Marfa Lights studies and a thorough research of their origins.
Dr. Artem S. Bilyk, Assistant Professor, Kiev Polytechnical Institute, Chairman of SRCAA “Zond”, Ukraine

Somebody could say “all this work to get there”. I would say YES. It is necessary, because to believe is easy, to understand is hard work. So, congratulations to the authors for their hard work. Today, our society is strongly concerned with fake news and some aversion to science, and any contribution which tries to balance this attitude is welcome.
Marcel Delaval, Informatics engineer, Joint Research Center of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy

When trying to observe the Lights with the CBS crew for "Unsolved Mysteries", I did determine that the Lights were incandescent in nature. Which fits with the "car light" hypothesis, but I really had hoped to make additional measurements of the Lights spectral signature to match those of car head lights. I never had the opportunity to do so.
Dr. Edwin Barker, University of Texas, McDonald Observatory, NASA/JSC Orbital Debris Program (ret), USA

The authors have tested the simplest hypothesis, one already postulated by other investigators: the light track phenomena observed are produced by car lights. In every single event when geographical verification has been possible, the photographed luminous trails match with local roads. These findings strongly weaken the hypothesis of existence of anomalous phenomena close to Marfa, Texas. This book is a great example of what should be a modern analysis of data on natural phenomena.
Prof. Vladimir Bychkov, Academician of Russian Academy of Natural Science, Russia
In this overwhelming work, Borraz and Ballester Olmos have analyzed some of the strangest Marfa Lights photographs and concluded that their nature is perfectly compatible with motor vehicle lights, without the need to invoke any unknown geophysical phenomena. During their work they mainly used software like Google Earth’s Photo Overlay tool and the stellar p

Oh well they used software, so...

Jim you have seen them?

Hasn’t this phenomenon existed pre-automobile era?

I have seen them and their height and the way they morph and change colors leads me to my own conclusion.

Too bad they couldn’t do more on the ground scientific testing. Before releasing a study and all.

Read my book. Blah Blah Blah.
We think, estimate, hope. Blah Blah.

on page 13 there is a map with a yellow swath to the left those seem to be the car lights that are a lot of the marfa sightings.....over to the right is a blue ( almost blends in with the back ground) they examined the blue area which is supposed to be the TRUE marfa lights


13
Figure 2. Map of the region of interest (base map: USGS).Most pictures of “mystery lights” taken from the Marfa Lights Viewing Center only show automobileheadlights traveling along U.S. Route 67, observed within the
yellow sector
. On the contrary, the alleged true mystery lights here under examination‒photographed by Bunnell from that sameplace‒were visible within the
blue sector
(mostly in its eastern subsector). Magnetic north accordingto the magnetic declination when Bunnell's book was written (+7.3° in 2014).Ranches (
numbered orange diamonds
):1.- Mitchell Ranch 2.- Antelope Spring Ranch I got through the 45 pages so far they mention that burnell made some mistakes in his numbers

this part talks about seeing light a really long time ago ...lights arriving on the Marfa plain over the decades ranged from matches, candles,campfires, and lanterns to the electrical lights of homes, autos, and railroad trains.The properties of these lights are analyzed and reveal the incredible distances from which lights can be seen by human eyes. Analysis of atmospheric temperaturefluctuations demonstrates how such variations can bend and guide a ray of light propagating in the air. This distortion from a straight-line path can lead to seemingly mysterious behavior of observed lights

originally posted by: raedar
Oh well they used software, so...

Jim you have seen them?

Hasn’t this phenomenon existed pre-automobile era?

I have seen them and their height and the way they morph and change colors leads me to my own conclusion.

Too bad they couldn’t do more on the ground scientific testing. Before releasing a study and all.

a reply to: raedar

I have seen them and their height and the way they morph and change colors leads me to my own conclusion.

That sounds sort of like what mirages do, they wiggle and wobble a lot.

a reply to: JimOberg

I'm amazed by how much effort and time was spent on this analysis.

Hopefully we'll (mankind) get similar high-quality day-time images to analyze.

a reply to: JimOberg

I thought i watched a tv show years ago now that they already settled this by flying a drone or helicopter over the area as well as driving a car around some bend to reproduce the lights. Is this book ground-breaking?

if you click on the link there are pictures and graphs and maps to look at

originally posted by: drewlander
a reply to: JimOberg

I thought i watched a tv show years ago now that they already settled this by flying a drone or helicopter over the area as well as driving a car around some bend to reproduce the lights. Is this book ground-breaking?

Funny thing about Marfa lights being only headlights is that you think there would be millions of reports of them every single night all over the planet.
I have never seen the Marfa lights myself, so I can't compare it with the millions of car headlights I have seen.

Good job bringing this to our attention Jim!

a reply to: JimOberg

When trying to observe the Lights with the CBS crew for "Unsolved Mysteries", I did determine that the Lights were incandescent in nature. Which fits with the "car light" hypothesis

What was your initial impression when you first saw the lights? I’m curious what a person with your background thinks when they see something like this.

a reply to: JimOberg

Being honest and realistic about it these authors haven't gone through the seeing is believing phase of ufo reality. No way (if the Marfa lights are anything like what we get here in Britain) are they car head lights. Oh my life please please please, the thread should be taken with an absolutely giant piece of salt as it's so out of touch with a phenomenon going back to the earliest recordings of lights in the sky.

a reply to: raedar

Hasn’t this phenomenon existed pre-automobile era?

According to multiple sites on the Internet, the sightings date back to 1883.

a reply to: ufoorbhunter

They are car headlights. Go there, look for yourself. Understanding what you see when you actually see them makes it make more sense. But they've also timed it with actual cars driving on a highway in Mexico. Its a proven.

I've spent some fair amount of time in Marfa for business (of all things in that tiny town), and took scenic driving tours in the evenings. It was before the St. George had opened, and the Paisano was booked full throughout my times there. So i stayed in the Thunderbird...and just about anything is more entertaining than hanging out in a bare bones tweak shack hotel room. So I'd drive.

a reply to: butcherguy

Back in the days of torches and lanterns? I'd believe it.

a reply to: ufoorbhunter


i am in your camp...
Natural stress forces are the source of the luminious artifacts....

the process is well known:

Piezoelectricity
Piezoelectricity
Piezoelectricity is the electric charge that accumulates in certain solid materials (such as crystals, certain ceramics, and biological matter such as bone, DNA and various proteins) in response to applied mechanical stress. The word piezoelectricity means electricity resulting from pressure and latent heat. It is derived from the Greek word πιέζειν; piezein, which means to squeeze or press, and ἤλεκτρον ēlektron, which means amber, an ancient source of electric charge. French physicists Jacques and Pierre Curie discovered piezoelectricity in 1880.

Wikipedia


there is another spot in the USA where a similar phenomena occurs with regularity...Brown Mountain Lights in western NC Applachian mountains

originally posted by: butcherguy
According to multiple sites on the Internet, the sightings date back to 1883.

According to multiple sites on the internet, the early death of Elvis was a hoax and he's still alive.

Even some myths get written down, but the pre-car Marfa lights claims apparently never got written down. They did have pens and paper in 1883, even if they didn't have cars yet.

What Are the Mysterious Marfa Lights?

According to oral history, Shafer says, the lights were first sighted by rancher Robert Ellison as he drove cattle from Alpine to Marfa in 1883...

Despite having written an autobiography later in life, Ellison never mentioned in print seeing the lights....

The earliest written account of the lights, however, appeared in the San Angelo Times in 1945, according to journalist Hall.

originally posted by: drewlander
a reply to: JimOberg

I thought i watched a tv show years ago now that they already settled this by flying a drone or helicopter over the area as well as driving a car around some bend to reproduce the lights. Is this book ground-breaking?

A paper was published in 2011 saying they were headlights according to the source I linked:

But in 2011, a group of scientists published a study in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics on the lights after coming to a much simpler conclusion: They determined that the lights are actually car headlights on nearby U.S. 67 that appear warped as they travel across 20 miles (32 kilometers) of flatland.

But I tried to follow the link they provided to that 2011 article and it's behind a paywall. The abstract talks about something else they studied which sound interesting, relating to lightning, that gave off 10kW of optical power, and I'm not aware of any car headlights that give off 10kW of power, so that light can't be headlights.

Without reading the paywalled, article I'm reading between the lines to guess it says they found headlights account for most of the Marfa lights, but they found another interesting source of a powerful light source there too, which can't be headlights if it's really 10 kW.

Quantitative intensity and location measurements of an intense long-duration luminous object near Marfa, Texas

On June 3, 2005, in western Texas, luminous phenomena, including an extremely bright luminous object (EBLO), which emitted light for over 3 h, were photographed by two automated monitoring stations during a series of intense thunderstorms. Certain lightning strokes recorded by the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) correlate well with the origin of the brightest object in time and space. Optical triangulation located it on the ground at a distance of about 28 km from the farthest station, and absolute radiometric measurements indicate the object's peak emitted visible-wavelength power was of the order of 10 kW. Possible explanations for these objects are discussed.

Highlights
We report observations of an extremely bright luminous object emitting 10 kW of optical power near Marfa, Texas.
► The object emitted light for more than 3 h after a lightning strike correlated with National Lightning Detection Network data.
► Possible explanations: ball lightning, power-line arc, exotic combustion, and Rydberg matter.

I don't think ball lightning can last for more than a few minutes so I'd rule that out for a light lasting 3h. A power-line arc is possible though I would have thought some safety switches would have shut down the power of a circuit with a 10 kW arc lasting more than a few seconds. Exotic combustion and exotic Rydberg matter? How could that be? Given they list four possibilities, it's obvious they don't know what the source of that 10 kW light was that lasted 3 hours, but it started at the same time as a lightning strike which sounds like more than coincidence.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Tank battery maybe? They can make a nice arc as they melt down and start flaming.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Tank battery maybe? They can make a nice arc as they melt down and start flaming.

If a tank battery has 10 kW x 3h = 30 kW-h of stored energy, it could be a possible source, but how likely is it lightning would strike an exposed tank battery? If it's inside a tank or storage facility those would tend to shield the battery from the lightning.

The event was captured by two monitoring stations so a possibility exists of triangulating distance/position of the source, though that might not work too well if the monitoring stations were close together. I don't know how they could calculate the 10 kW of the source without knowing the distance, so I assume they did a triangulation to determine that. However I doubt they surveyed the approximate area of the source to look for fires in a timely manner, since the event happened in 2005, and the paper was published in 2011.

I don't know the specifications for tank batteries, but I've worked with electric forklifts which can have a huge battery capacity, including 30 kWh, though they are more for indoor use in my experience. You can drive them outside though. So yes I suppose there are other possibilities besides what they mentioned.

Forklift Batteries

energy capacities ranging from 6 kWh to 63 kWh. The battery systems are available in different shapes and sizes to meet a multitude of Class I, II and III forklift truck models from various manufacturers.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

I dunno mate, some maybe the car lights but not all of em. Totally envious that you made it to the Marfas (in a brotherly way of course) and would love to see em when make it to the Americas

Ay up St Uido.................. Yeah there definitely something going on more than the car headlights. The Piezoleccy is certainly up there in the midst of things with the crystals etc it's all like one big cocktail of life. Can this answer the fact that the lights are seen often in conjunction with radiant white motherships, can act intelligently, can have lazer beam facilities attached to them, can also morph into other shapes like body builders dumbells................ I dunno but it defo going on out there, fun to comtemplate, certainly not (just) car headlamps

originally posted by: St Udio
a reply to: ufoorbhunter


i am in your camp...
Natural stress forces are the source of the luminious artifacts....

the process is well known:

Piezoelectricity
Piezoelectricity
Piezoelectricity is the electric charge that accumulates in certain solid materials (such as crystals, certain ceramics, and biological matter such as bone, DNA and various proteins) in response to applied mechanical stress. The word piezoelectricity means electricity resulting from pressure and latent heat. It is derived from the Greek word πιέζειν; piezein, which means to squeeze or press, and ἤλεκτρον ēlektron, which means amber, an ancient source of electric charge. French physicists Jacques and Pierre Curie discovered piezoelectricity in 1880.

Wikipedia


there is another spot in the USA where a similar phenomena occurs with regularity...Brown Mountain Lights in western NC Applachian mount