Tag: bioluminescence

In Occam’s Razor and Marfa Lights, I wrote about comparing the fourth hypothesis of James Bunnell with the “nocturnal flying predators” hypothesis. Simplicity awarded the flying predators with victory, for “Electromagnetic Vortexes” requires too many unknown entities. Now I would like to write about data accumulated by Bunnell and included in the “B1” table of his book, Hunting Marfa Lights.

First, we need to come to an understanding about the potential uses of bioluminescence of large flying creatures. They are not resticted to hunting prey. Other potential uses may include courtship and protecting territory. Although some reports of Marfa Lights include a word like “play,” it would be too speculative to deal with that possibility at present. We also need to understand that intelligent predators that hunt as a group may use more than one technique in their group hunting.

We need to understand that this predator hypothesis need not involve living pterosaurs.

We also need to understand that the cameras set up by Bunnell cover only a limited area of the plain where Marfa Lights are reported, and there may have been periods of time in which one or more cameras were not functioning or functioning at less than their optimum level. Within the hypothesis of bioluminescent flying predators, we need to consider these limitations.

Table “B1” of Bunnell’s book is filled to the brim with data, including start times and end times for the mystery lights. Other data include “Was moon up?” and wind direction, as well as temperature, humidity, visibility, and sunset times.

For the moment, I would like to analyze one small portion of the data.

We will presume, for the moment, that a group of bioluminescent flying predators spend much of their glowing time, but not all of it, hunting one or more types of prey in different areas that include southwest Texas and possibly adjoining areas of Mexico. I say “much” because there may be occasional courtship behavior and terrritorial disputes in which bioluminescence is manifest.

We will also presume that this group has more than one, but not many, sleeping locations in this part of North America. At night, they may fly to a number of close areas surrounding particular sleeping areas. After a certain number of days or weeks they may move to another sleeping area, with its attendant surrounding hunting areas.

We will also presume that this group of predators have more than one hunting technique, depending not only on the kind of prey but on the conditions of the hunt. For example, bats may be hunted when they are feeding on insects in the air or when they are hibernating in a cave, necessitating a different technique for hunting the same prey.

We now notice the resulting complexity of potential behaviors and area patterns resulting from the above conditions. On any particular night, it would be unlikely that even one of Bunnell’s cameras would pick up even one CE type mystery light. But we have room for at least one prediction.

Over a period of months, some of the nocturnal hunting excursions may be especially successful, even if the prey is a species of small animal like a bat, in particular the Big Brown Bat that is common in this part of Texas. This bat is “big” only when compared with other bats in this area of North America, for it is only about half a pound in weight. What can we predict after an especially successful hunt? The next night may see those predators hunting in the same area or a nearby area. If the successful hunt were early in the evening, soon after sunset, the second night may also be early in the evening.

We now examine some of Bunnell’s data for camera recordings of significant mystery light appearances from late 2000 through late 2008. About 20% of those nights involve the return of mystery lights on at least two consecutive nights, never more than three nights in succession, and only one occurance being that maximum length. When the night-successions themselves are counted, it is only about 11%.

The following dates are in Universal Time, not Texas dates, although the sunset times are local for Texas time. Sorry if there is any confusion.

What is most important is this: 75% of those one-night successions involved starting times less than twenty minutes apart, for example one hour and nineteen minutes after sunset on May 8, 2003 and one hour and thirty-eight minutes after sunset on May 9, 2003. On July 15-16, 2006, mystery lights first appeared only about one minute apart: thirty-eight and thirty-seven minutes after sunset, respectively.

How important is that one minute difference? First I’d like to get just a bit off the subject. When Bunnell’s cameras record a mystery light or lights on any particular night, it is usually after weeks or months since the last recording. An exception is the occasional one or two nights in a row of appearances. But there seems to be a total absence of 3-10 nights between appearances. That would be expected of a group of roaming predators, for they change hunting locations after one or two nights in one area, not soon returning to an area in which most of the easy prey may have already been recently caught.

Getting back to that one minute difference between July 15th and 16th, in 2006, we now look at a typical difference in when a mystery light first appears after sunset. The average difference in first appearance after sunset, between sighting nights, those which may be as much as months apart, is two hours and thirty-six minutes, which is a lot more than one minute. This involves those night successions that were more than seven days apart, and 89% of them were. I found that about 79% of those were more than thirty minutes apart and about 93% were more than five minutes apart, with the smallest difference being one succession at three minutes apart. Turning away from those successions that were weeks apart, one minute, for the July 15-16 succession, is extremely close.

How is that July 15-16, 2006, event coorelated with the bioluminescent flying predators hypothesis? On the first night, hunting was very successful, so on the second night the predators left their den a minute earlier, arriving only 37 minutes after sunset, instead of 38, to hunt in that same general area.

As stated in my previous post, “Occam’s Razor and Marfa Lights,” Bunnell’s best hypothesis is called “Electromagnetic Vortexes.” But it seems to me that it could be difficult to explain the above data with the EV hypothesis. We now look at other data, relevant to these two appearances 24 hours apart.

On the second night, the temperature at the beginning of the appearance was two degrees C. cooler than the first night. There were other differences: “Temperature Change (day high to ML Start)” and Dew Point and Humidity and wind speed were all significantly different. Why would a non-living energy, under such varied conditions, begin its appearance at almost the same time after sunset on two successive nights? “Bioluminescent flying predators” wins again.

For more information, see “Lions, Pterodactyls, and Marfa Ghost Lights.”

I know I’ve already written about car headlights and Marfa Lights. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many times I have written about Marfa Lights, in particular about the possibility that they may be the bioluminescence of flying predators, even nocturnal creatures that hunt bats. But I keep reading materials that reflect unclear thinking habits or careless research on this subject, and the most recent article that has bothered me is titled, “Marfa Lights: A Real American Mystery.”

The web site is called “Skeptoid,” so it seems that scientific skepticism is in order. But this article or blog post by Brian Dunning fails to live up to a reasonable expectation in this. When he mentioned accounts of “the lights” appearing before the existence of automobiles, he says:

“Throughout history there have been hundreds and hundreds of reported “ghost lights” that probably never existed outside of the observers’ whiskey-soaked imaginations.”

What a far cry from scientific skepticism! How convenient, when “hundreds” of witnesses experience something contradicting ones idea, to say it came from drinking whiskey!

To be fair to Mr. Dunning, we need to remember that some of these sighting reports are quite strange: flying lights that seem to fly in ways related to each other. These flights are too complex–I believe “complex” is the word used by James Bunnell–to be easily explained as an ordinary phenomenon. But the strange reactions some person might have to consuming alcohol does not mean that all strange experiences should be dismissed with “whiskey.” We can admit that not-yet-explained things may exist.

I think it timely to suggest some online resources, on Marfa Lights, that are more worthy of consideration, regardless of how strange they might at first appear:

Marfa Lights and Lost Time

I will not offer any deep explanation for why these witnesses lost track of three hours. Could it have been difference in time zone or over sleeping after a mostly sleepless night observing Marfa Lights? I will suggest noting the colors of the flying lights they observed: green, orange, red, yellow, and blue.

Suddenly, off in the field, we could see a red light. It was far away and we thought, “Well, maybe…” The red light disappeared… and then there were two orange lights. These orange lights wandered around, bobbed up and down, and got closer and closer to each other until they joined, flared briefly, and became a yellow light that slowly disappeared.

These flying lights were nowhere near any highway, and appeared in such varied colors as to rule out the possibility that they were car headlights.

Marfa Lights in Texas

The cryptozoological possibility seems weird, but there are similarities with the ropen lights of Papua New Guinea, and there the lights are said to be nocturnal flying creatures described like giant Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs: ropens.

Marfa Lights of Texas

Briefly mentioned is the sighting experience of a Mr. Greene, early in 2010. More details are given in Whitcomb’s book Live Pterosaurs in America, second edition.

I took special interest in one of the lights that Mr. Greene described to me. It flew around for over two hours, until the sun was about to come up. At least once, it dived down, at a speed apparently consistant with what I would expect of a B.F.C. that is hunting bats, diving after one bat.

Book Review related to Marfa Lights

Retired NASA engineer James Bunnell has spent 8 years studying these lights, and concludes that while many can be explained in terms of well understood causes, others are much more puzzling. He has managed to obtain films and/or spectrographical analysis of some of these lights, which seem to rule out some of the more obvious explanations.

Old Records of Marfa Lights

This relates to the Dunning article “Marfa Lights: A Real American Mystery.”

‘Well, apparently, the Marfa Lights have not been around all that long, after all.’ How did Dunning come to that conclusion? His brief post gives no hint that he has done years of research looking for old records of Marfa Lights; that I seriously doubt. Even if he had searched for years, how could he be sure that he had not missed some nineteenth-century journal that described those mysterious lights?

Marfa Lights and Min Mins

Come with me to Victoria, Australia, along Salisbury Road in Mt. Macedon. Notice, as we enter an open window, that Mr. Fred Silcock is sleeping in the easy chair by the fireplace. Now search for a thin brown book on the bookshelf. That’s the one; the spine says “The Min Min Light  F.F. Silcock”. Notice the drawing of a glowing barn owl on the cover.

Actually this blog post is more about Marfa Lights than glowing barn owls.

Marfa Light, How Bright!

Note that other observations of CE-III mystery lights (a designation Bunnell gives to certain lights around Marfa: lights that travel and exhibit combustion-like attributes) sometimes involve light “splitting.”