Martha is a tiny city in the far west of the American state of Texas. Famous Hollywood films were filmed here, but ghost lights that came from nowhere brought him real fame. "360" tells what is known about the mysterious phenomenon.
The lights were first seen by a lone cowboy, Robert Reed Ellison, driving a herd of cattle across the plains of western Texas in the fall of 1883. It was night, the outlines of the houses of the nearest town of Martha had not yet appeared in the distance, but the cold darkness of the prairies was already illuminated by a distant glow.
The cowboy was not too surprised - in the cold transparent air, even a small field fire is visible at a great distance. Another thing was strange - several lights were of different colors and seemed to be dancing. Realizing that these were not the fires of bandits or Apaches, Allison tried to catch up with the glowing balls, but to no avail - when the rider made his way through the bushes, they seemed to vanish into thin air. The meeting of the cowboy with the wandering lights marked the beginning of a legend whose origins are still not fully understood.
The Flying Texans
As if flickering, and sometimes brightly flashing beams of light annually attract masses of adventurers and lovers of the unusual to the desert area near the border with Mexico, where the town of Martha with a population of less than two thousand people is located. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the United States.
Jumping over the horizon, then merging into a single whole, then disintegrating into a host of lights, the mysterious spheres eventually became the "Flying Dutchman" of the endless prairies of the Wild West. Usually yellow-orange and golden, they can also shimmer in green, white, blue or red colors.
You can see how mysterious balls of pure light are suddenly born over the prairie. They can hang in one place, pulsing with varying intensity from dim light to almost blinding - James Bunnell, quote from the book "The Hunt for the Lights of Martha."
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From the moment of the first contact in 1883, the lights began to be seen constantly - this phenomenon occurs in different parts of the world, but only Martha's ghostly balls turned out to be truly elusive.
Over the past century, interest in these lights has attracted a wide variety of people from scientists to adventurers to the remote area. More than once they tried to catch the spheres - dashing cowboys chased them on the best mustangs, powerful jeeps and even small planes. But each time the spheres confirmed their reputation as elusive ghosts. UFO signal lights, the ghosts of the Spanish conquistadors who died during the hike for the damned Indian gold or a natural phenomenon - each researcher of the phenomenon has his own answer to this question.
Chasing a mirage
Since ancient times, inexplicable flashes of light in the darkness of the night have been associated with legends about ghosts. Allegedly, these are demonic fires - the souls of drowned or gallows, stuck between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Modern science naturally rejects such claims. There are several rational explanations for "demonic". At different times, ball lightning or light emanating from phosphorescent minerals was taken for an otherworldly glow. Hydrogen containing phosphorus is also sometimes released in large cemeteries, and bubbles of combustible methane gas rise above the swamps.
But on the prairies where Martha's fires meet, there are no swamps, no cemeteries, no glowing minerals. Proponents of the mirage theory seem to have come closest to understanding the riddle.
Australia has its own wandering min-min lights, says Pravda.ru. Ghostly bunches of light scared casual travelers in the Australian wilderness for almost a century, until scientist Jack Pettigrew managed to create a similar effect on his own.
Having chosen a hot day, he waited for a cold, windless evening and drove ten kilometers from the participants in the experiment in a car with headlights on. Soon a ghostly light hovered on the horizon.
The explanation turned out to be the simplest, in the desert mirages can occur - phenomena that occur at a huge distance from the observer, but visible to the eye due to the peculiarities of light refraction in layers of cold and warm air. A number of weather experts believe that the lights of Marfa are exactly the same mirages: the reflection of distant headlights or campfires. But no one has yet been able to repeat them artificially in this area.
According to some local residents, there are secrets that better remain unsolved.
My parents and my grandparents saw them. They have always been here. I Hope We Never Know What It Is - Mysteries Make Our Lives Interesting - Marfa Resident Ori West, quoted by BBC.
Russian roots
An unusual light phenomenon has become the hallmark of "El despoblado" - in Spanish, the area around the city of Marfa is called "uninhabited". Indeed, for tens of kilometers around the town lies wasteland.
If it were not for the continental railway, which at the end of the nineteenth century passed through these lands, people might never have learned about the mysterious lights of Martha. Around the railway station, as was often the case in the wild West, this unusual city with a Russian name arose.
According to legend, the name of the settlement was given by the wife of the chief engineer of a construction company. The woman whiled away the time with the novel The Brothers Karamazov. Among the characters in Dostoevsky's book, she liked Marfa Ignatievna Kutuzova, the adoptive mother of one of the main characters, Pavel Smerdyakov.
So the work of the great writer unexpectedly gave the name to the city in the American wilderness and the incomprehensible phenomenon observed in its vicinity.
Either the inexplicable attractiveness of ghostly lights, or the magic of a mysterious name has attracted creative people and representatives of show business to a small town for many years. Here, in particular, the epic drama "Giant" was filmed, which brought posthumous fame to James Dean - according to rumors, the great actor watched the mysterious lights through a telescope from the window of his hotel room at night. And 50 years later, in the vicinity of Martha, filming of the Coen brothers' cruel thriller "No Country for Old Men" was organized.
Alexey Yesod
