Marfa Lights in Summary

With so many recent posts and pages about the predator-conjecture for Marfa Lights, it's now timely to summarize them.

Satire and Marfa Lights

Prompted by a press release about a new interpretation of the Marfa Lights of Texas, and the publication of a nonfiction cryptozoology book with a chapter devoted to those strange ghost lights, the blogger ridiculed the idea that the source of those lights are bioluminescent flying predators that may even be living pterosaurs. I wrote both the press release and the book it promotes.

Marfa Lights, Pterodactyls, and Other Lights

Evelyn Cheesman, a British biologist who is now known as the first woman to be a curator at the Regent's Park Zoo in London, witnessed strange lights during one of her expeditions in the southwest Pacific. She wrote about them in her 1935 book The Two Roads of Papua. But in her lifetime she never realized the potential significance of those lights to biology. In the early twenty-first century, a few cryptozoologists began suggesting the "Cheesman Lights" were made by flying creatures related to the ropen of Papua New Guinea.

Now the Marfa Lights are being evaluated for their potential as flying predators, and bioluminescent ones at that, similar to the ropen lights. All of them, including the Cheesman Lights, are probably bioluminescent flying predators, and eyewitness sightings in daylight indicate at least some of them are large living pterosaurs, called by some Americans "pterodactyls."

Marfa Lights and Car Headlights

There is adequate studies to make this clear: Night mirages of car headlights can sometimes appear mysterious. But that is not the point. Other lights that occasionally fly around this part of southwest Texas appear quite different; they are not mirages of car headlights.

Dunning, in his post "The Marfa Lights: A Real American Mystery," falters in two ways when he sells car headlights or exchanges them for mysterious Marfa Lights. . . .