Located within the Chihuahuan Desert in northeastern Presidio County of far West Texas is the dusty desert city of Marfa. Founded as a water stop in the early 1880s, Marfa sits like an oasis surrounded by sprawling desolate desert, but despite its inhospitable location it has become a sort of center for minimalist art, and is known for its galleries, artisan shops, and historical architecture. Yet the town has become famous for something else as well, and here out in the desert badlands there has long been a mysterious, possibly paranormal light show that has never really been explained.

Marfa, Texas

What have come to be known as the Marfa Lights typically appear as orbs of light about the size of a basketball, that materialize out in the desert wasteland of Mitchell Flat looking towards the Chinati Mountains, to hover, fly, and dance about in the night before vanishing. They come in many colors, including white, yellow, pink, blue, and red, and can be very bright or faint, steadily illuminated or twinkling or flickering. The lights feature a wide range of movement and behaviors, either flying in a straight line or conversely bobbing up and down, darting about erratically, doing aerial acrobatics, accelerating or decelerating, or even merging together into larger orbs or disappearing and reappearing. They sometimes move slowly, at other times hovering stationary, or on other occasions travelling at great speed, often all of the above. One local by the name of James Bunnell has said of the Marfa Lights:

You might just see mysterious orbs of light suddenly appear above desert foliage. These balls of light may remain stationary as they pulse on and off with intensity varying from dim to almost blinding brilliance. Then again, these ghostly lights may dart across the desert or perform splits and mergers. Light colors are usually yellow-orange but other hues, including green, blue and red are also seen. Marfa Mystery Lights usually fly above desert vegetation but below background mesas.

The lights also don’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason to their appearances, emerging at all times of the year and in all kinds of weather, and they have been baffling those who see them for a very long time. Although the Native Americans had long known of the lights, perhaps the first historical record of the Marfa lights by settlers was in 1883, when a rancher named Robert Reed Ellison reported seeing a group of glowing orbs as he drove his cattle through Paisano Pass. He assumed that they were Apache campfires, but no evidence of any fires or campsites could be found the following day. After that, more and more people began reporting the mysterious lights, and over the decades there would be so many sightings that during World War II there was even an air search conducted by pilots from nearby Midland Army Air Field to find the source of the lights, but they came back empty-handed and puzzled. On some occasions there have been reports that the lights seem to show some sort of intelligence, sometimes coming closer as if out of curiosity or seeming to investigate certain areas, or to react to sound, and there are even stories of people lost in the desert being led to safety by the lights. But what are they and where do they come from? That depends a lot on who you ask.

There have been numerous theories as to what the lights may be. One is that they are some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, in particular one called a Fata Morgana, which is an optical illusion that causes far away objects to appear closer and distorted through light passing through air layers of different temperatures in a steep thermal inversion, in which a defined layer of warm air is resting on a layer of much cooler air. Another idea is that these are the similarly distorted lights car headlights on the nearby Highway 67, made to look fuzzy and wavering by light scattering due to the air being unevenly heated by the ground, but this would not explain why they are most often seen well away from the highway, why they display such erratic and aberrant movements, why they have so many different appearances, or how they would have been seen so much back in 1883. Other ideas include static electricity produced by geological activity, ball lighting, illuminated gases from the natural gas and other petroleum hydrocarbons in the area, and of course alien UFOs and even ghosts, perhaps even all of the above. No one really knows for sure.

In the meantime, Marfa has embraced the lights and sought to turn them into a tourist attraction. There is a roadside parking area nine miles east of Marfa on U.S. Highway 90 specifically built for passing motorists to view the curious phenomenon, complete with a Marfa Lights viewing platform, and there is even an annual Marfa Lights Festival that features live music, food and a parade. What is going on with these lights? What are they? Are they just distant car headlights morphed into something more mysterious by atmospheric phenomena or are at least some of them something stranger? For now the Marfa lights still occasionally come out to do their dance, and no one is entirely sure of what they truly are.

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Over the decades, numerous people in the UFO field have become the subjects of government files. And no, that’s not a case of being paranoid. Dozens upon dozens of well-known people in the UFO scene really have had their lives scrutinized, and all in the name of little green men. Well, not quite. Yes, the files do exist. But, the reasons for why such dossiers have been put together might surprise you. Indeed, most of the people in the subject have been watched because of something far more inflammatory than aliens: politics. Take the most controversial Contactee of all, George Adamski. He claimed to have had meetings out in the wilds of California with peace-loving ETs. He even claimed flights in Flying Saucers. Yeah, right. And, his FBI file runs to hundreds of pages. And I’m not kidding. The FBI, however, wasn’t particularly bothered about Adamski’s claims of extraterrestrial contact. What the Bureau was concerned about , however, was his politics. In the early 1950s, in his usually packed lectures, Adamski said that communism was the way of the future and that Russia could destroy the West, if it chose to. The fact that all of this was influencing the minds of hundreds upon hundreds of gullible people was of deep concern to the FBI. Hence, the reason why the “Adamski file” was opened.

Likewise, fellow Contactee George Van Tassel had a lengthy file opened on him. It ran to 319 pages. Again, the Bureau cared not a bit about Van Tassel’s alleged alien contacts. They were very interested, though, in Van Tassel’s words on American politics, religion, the U.S. government, the economy and more. For years, literally thousands upon thousands of people headed out to Giant Rock, California to hear Van Tassel talk. And the FBI listened carefully. Now, onto George Hunt Williamson. Certainly, he was a well-known figure in the world of the Contactees and the Space Brothers. And, an FBI file was opened on the man. The reason? Nothing to do with aliens. The primary reason why Williamson had a file on him was because he was suspected of smuggling ancient artifacts over the Mexico border and into the United States. Something like that is all but guaranteed to ensure a file will be opened on you. For a while the FBI deeply pondered on whether or not they should get further involved in the pursuit of a potential crime that had occurred outside of its jurisdiction and in another country – Mexico – but finally dropped the matter; rather fortunately, it must be said, for Williamson.

Now, let’s jump forward almost half a century after the antics of the “Three Georges.” Certain people in Ufology laughed and were highly skeptical when, in 2006, I wrote a book called On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, in which I mentioned how a retired British police source told me that, back in the 1990s, the British Police Force’s Special Branch opened files on two UFO researchers in the UK, namely Matthew Williams and Robin Cole. Those same certain people should have kept their mouths firmly shut. The files on Cole and Williams (or, rather, some of the files; others still remain classified to this day) were finally officially released in 2012, showing that Special Branch was indeed watching both men, demonstrating that the data provided to me years ago was accurate. When, in 2012, the documents were declassified, the National Archives prepared the following statement concerning their contents:

“File DEFE 24/1984/1 (p294) contains a 1996 Parliamentary Question from Martin Redmond MP asking on how many occasions MI6 and GCHQ have monitored UFO investigations. This was interpreted to mean ‘have the agencies been keeping watch on UFOlogists.’ A background briefing says ‘neither agency in fact undertakes such activity, though GCHQ cannot rule out the possibility’ they had monitored ‘in other contexts individuals who have made a study of UFOs’. The MP was told the government do not comment on the intelligence and security agencies (p298). File DEFE 24/1987/1 (p262-65) reveals that in 1997 Special Branch took an interest in a UFOlogist who became obsessed with rumours of a secret UFO facility beneath RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire. The base had become known as the British equivalent of the secret US military airbase ‘Area 51’ among conspiracy theorists. An internal note said ‘Special Branch…do not believe he poses a specific threat to security, but they are alert to the risk that others may use him as a conduit for their activities.'”

Well, since the summary failed to note the names of the people in question, I will. They were, of course, Cole and Williams – as I had been told during the course of writing On the Trail of the Saucer Spies. Back in 1997, Robin Cole, of Cheltenham, England – the home to GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters) – wrote a fascinating report on the agency’s involvement in the UFO phenomenon. And, for those who may not be aware, GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the US National Security Agency. After Cole’s report was published, he was visited by two representatives of the UK’s Special Branch. And since the pair announced their visit in advance (via a phone-call), Robin had the good sense to clandestinely and quickly set up his tape-recorder in his living-room and taped the entire conversation, much of which revolved around Special Branch’s interest in a UFO researcher and Crop Circle maker named Matthew Williams – who just happens to be the “UFOlogist who became obsessed” with RAF Rudloe Manor, as referenced by National Archives staff above. Special Branch’s concerns that both the UFO controversy and the people that investigate it could be used as tools of manipulation by hostile groups with controversial, political agendas.

Since the 1950s, files have been opened on Ufologists. On every occasion, though, UFOs were shown not to have been the primary cause for concern on the part of government agencies. But, politics, in particular, was. In all likelihood, it still is.

It was in the summer of 1947 that something crashed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico. Whatever it was, it left huge amounts of strange debris across the ranch. There was talk of strange, small bodies also having been found in the area, thrown out of the craft that exploded on impact. Within no time at all, personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field were on the scene, preventing anyone outside of the military from getting anywhere near the crash site.  Cordons were created and people were warned never to talk about what they had seen. The problem (in fact, a very big problem) for the military, though, is that the rancher who found the materials, William Brazel, had told fellow ranchers in the area, and friends, about his find before the military was informed – which meant that at least parts of the story were out there before the military’s cover-up began. That was not a good thing. There was even confusion at the Roswell Army Air Field: before orders were put into place to prevent anyone talking, the press-office at the base issued a statement saying that a flying disc (as UFOs were known back then) had been recovered and was due to be inspected.

One such statement, from Associated Press, read as follows:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509^th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509^th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

The military quickly knocked that statement down, claiming that what had been recovered was nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. As for the bodies, the Air Force would not even address that matter until 1997, when they claimed that the bodies were, in fact, crash-test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. It was also in the nineties that the Air Force changed its mind again on what came down on William Braazel’s ranch. It was no longer a weather-balloon, but a Mogul balloon, designed to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests. In 1993, all of this chopping and changing caught the attention of the late Steven Schiff, at the time the Congressman of New Mexico – the state in which the Roswell event occurred. Far from happy by what he saw as some kind of cover-up, Schiff approached the Government Accountability Office (at the time, it was known as the General Accounting Office) and asked them to look into the Roswell affair and see what might be found. The GAO was enthused about the idea of looking into Roswell. It was, however, not so much what the GAO found that intrigued them, but what they couldn’t find.

As the GAO dug deeper and deeper, they learned to their amazement and concern that every single outgoing message from the old Roswell Army Air Field, from 1945 to 1951, could not be located. The files were gone. All of them. The GAO approached the Air Force and the National Archives for answers. There were no answers. Only puzzles. The National Archives checked their files: no luck. The Air Force came up blank, too. Rumors began to surface that when Steven Schiff approached the GAO in 1993, someone who was sitting on the Roswell story quickly realized that the truth of the 1947 incident was now in danger of being compromised, so a decision was quickly taken to have the original papers – wherever they were stored – destroyed. There is a very good reason for that: the GAO is an extremely powerful office of the U.S. Government and certainly had the power and ability to demand access to just about anything it wanted access to. Shredding the old Roswell Army Air Field papers may have been the only way to have ensured that the GAO didn’t get what it and Congressman Schiff wanted. It was just another layer of conspiracy in the quest to understand what really happened at Roswell. The outcome: the GAO concluded the files had been destroyed. Congressman Schiff was irate. The cover-up remained in place. It still does.

It was in the summer of 1947 that something crashed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico. Whatever it was, it left huge amounts of strange debris across the ranch. There was talk of strange, small bodies also having been found in the area, thrown out of the craft that exploded on impact. Within no time at all, personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field were on the scene, preventing anyone outside of the military from getting anywhere near the crash site.  Cordons were created and people were warned never to talk about what they had seen. The problem (in fact, a very big problem) for the military, though, is that the rancher who found the materials, William Brazel, had told fellow ranchers in the area, and friends, about his find before the military was informed – which meant that at least parts of the story were out there before the military’s cover-up began. That was not a good thing. There was even confusion at the Roswell Army Air Field: before orders were put into place to prevent anyone talking, the press-office at the base issued a statement saying that a flying disc (as UFOs were known back then) had been recovered and was due to be inspected.

One such statement, from Associated Press, read as follows:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509^th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509^th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

The military quickly knocked that statement down, claiming that what had been recovered was nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. As for the bodies, the Air Force would not even address that matter until 1997, when they claimed that the bodies were, in fact, crash-test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. It was also in the nineties that the Air Force changed its mind again on what came down on William Braazel’s ranch. It was no longer a weather-balloon, but a Mogul balloon, designed to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests. In 1993, all of this chopping and changing caught the attention of the late Steven Schiff, at the time the Congressman of New Mexico – the state in which the Roswell event occurred. Far from happy by what he saw as some kind of cover-up, Schiff approached the Government Accountability Office (at the time, it was known as the General Accounting Office) and asked them to look into the Roswell affair and see what might be found. The GAO was enthused about the idea of looking into Roswell. It was, however, not so much what the GAO found that intrigued them, but what they couldn’t find.

As the GAO dug deeper and deeper, they learned to their amazement and concern that every single outgoing message from the old Roswell Army Air Field, from 1945 to 1951, could not be located. The files were gone. All of them. The GAO approached the Air Force and the National Archives for answers. There were no answers. Only puzzles. The National Archives checked their files: no luck. The Air Force came up blank, too. Rumors began to surface that when Steven Schiff approached the GAO in 1993, someone who was sitting on the Roswell story quickly realized that the truth of the 1947 incident was now in danger of being compromised, so a decision was quickly taken to have the original papers – wherever they were stored – destroyed. There is a very good reason for that: the GAO is an extremely powerful office of the U.S. Government and certainly had the power and ability to demand access to just about anything it wanted access to. Shredding the old Roswell Army Air Field papers may have been the only way to have ensured that the GAO didn’t get what it and Congressman Schiff wanted. It was just another layer of conspiracy in the quest to understand what really happened at Roswell. The outcome: the GAO concluded the files had been destroyed. Congressman Schiff was irate. The cover-up remained in place. It still does.

If one follows the waters of Loch Ness as they flow into River Ness, they next move into Beauly Firth (an inlet), then Moray Firth before entering the North Sea. Along the way, they pass the ancient fishing town and current seaside resort of Nairn. While it doesn’t have a loch monster, Nairn has a monstrosity of its own that has been plaguing residents for decades without an explanation or resolution – a mysterious hum similar to those plaguing people in other towns around the world. The Nairn Hum is back in the news again – will this time be any different or are Nairners doomed to continue to suffer from a monster that doesn’t help tourism or their nerves at all?

“It’s an absolute nightmare. We are getting tortured in our own house. It’s a low frequency pulsing noise and it’s incessant. My husband thinks it could come from an electricity substation and it’s also been suggested it could be coming from as far away as Invergordon. We just don’t know. One of our neighbours a couple of fields away hears a droning pulsating noise all the time too. We can’t even go into our caravan at the bottom of the garden because of the noise.”

Blan Bremner and her husband Robert told The Inverness Courier this past week about the “incessant” droning Nairn hum which tortures and puzzles them and their neighbors. Robert claims it has given the couple headaches and “I have nose bleeds,” yet the hum has not gone away nor been explained since they first reported it, according to an archived article in the Scottish Daily Mail in 2018.

“We started hearing the noise on February 9 when we moved into our home. Then when our new chimney was put up it seemed to act like an amplifier for the noise. It’s everywhere around Ardersier and Nairn.”

For decades, some residents of Largs on the Firth of Clyde have reported being plagued by a low, unexplained droning sound which has been dubbed the "Largs Hum".

PIC: Dave Souza/Wikipedia/Creative Commons.

That article reports that environmental health officials were called and they were unable to link the noise to any physical cause like the local airport, electricity substations, ferries or wind farms. A Highland Council spokesperson said they’ve received only one report and an inspector heard nothing. However, the hum report sounds similar to many in Largs, North Ayrshire – another seaside town about 170 miles south – which date back to the 1980s and have never been explained to frustrated residents.

“As a member for these areas I have investigated fully, but frankly it remains a mystery. I can only surmise that it must be something to do with recent developments in the area. I have visited homes myself and these are very real complaints. I’ve heard it for myself. As a council we have carried out tests by our environmental health department but we can’t pin down where it’s coming from. I’ve done everything I can. We’ve had our staff at the council and SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) investigating, but I just don’t know how some of these poor souls live with this. You can’t avoid the noise and it’s having a terrible impact on their wellbeing.”

That frustration is felt by Culloden and Ardersier councillor Glynis Campbell-Sinclair, who represents Nairn. She tells The Inverness Courier that factory expansions and new sewer works have been ruled out, and she’s obviously at a loss to comfort or help her constituents.

Where’s Saint Ninian – patron of Nairn?

If it’s not physical, is the Nairn hum something paranormal – perhaps linked to its close proximity to Loch Ness, where paranormal activities have been proposed to explain the mysterious appearances and disappearances of its famous monster?

Blan and Robert Bremner and their neighbors probably don’t care what it is – even if it’s a paranormal cause that could help local tourism – they just want the Nairn hum gone.

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When it comes to weird cults, you could do a lot worse than the Stella Maris Gnostic Church. Based in South America, specifically Cartagena, Colombia, it was founded in 1989 by a man named Rodolfo Perez, who brought over several members of the Universal Christian Gnostic Movement to help him kickstart his project. Shortly after its formation, the cult began to make a name for itself as being rather odd, to say the least. It quickly gained a reputation as doomsday cult, pronouncing that there was a great cataclysm awaiting mankind, and they made it all even weirder by proclaiming that the only way to escape this fate was to be whisked away by aliens from outer space. This would lead to a strange mass vanishing surrounded by talk of odd beliefs, brainwashing, and aliens.

Over the years there would be many reports to the police from concerned family members who worried that their loved ones had been completely brainwashed by the enigmatic and charismatic cult leader Rogelio Perea, who went through great lengths to make sure his members severed all ties with the outside world, and viewing material existence as flawed or evil. At the time, there was a lot in the news about this mysterious group, and through it all they became ever more obsessed with the idea that the cataclysm was upon us, and that they had to make preparations to leave aboard a spaceship, with the similarities with the infamous Heaven’s Gate Cult not lost on anyone at all. Specifically, the Stella Maris Gnostic Church believed that exactly 140,000 of the faithful from the world’s population would be saved by aliens during the doomsday, and the rest would perish.

The Stella Maris Gnostic Church

In June of 1999 there was reported a good amount of activity from the cult’s compound in Cartegena, as if they were getting ready for something big. There was much speculation on what this could be, but it was hard to ascertain anything, as the members had mostly cut all ties with their families and the outside world in general. However, some rumors began to creep out when some of the family members reported sporadic contact with their brainwashed loved ones, which hinted that the cult was preparing to head out into the wilderness to await their promised salvation from the stars. One woman with a daughter in the cult would say:

The two leaders told my daughter Liliana that she was God’s chosen one and made her change her name to Stella Maris to brainwash her. She was convinced she was going to make contact with flying saucers. My daughter told me she had to leave because a cataclysm was going to occur and that she had to go to a high place to meet extraterrestrials who would save them from the end of the world. The leader of the group told them the world was going to end in August and that they had to go to meet some aliens. She was convinced that cosmic beings were coming to save a chosen few from some big catastrophe. I couldn’t stop her.

The group made preparations and their official statement was that they were going on an annual retreat near San Pedro, Colombia, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, yet the leaked accounts pointed to them on a mission to actually go meet aliens in the wilderness, in an area well-known for its intense UFO activity. One day in July of 1999, a group of around 60 cult members, in some reports up to 100, many of them comprising whole families, reportedly headed off into the dim wilderness, abandoning their facility in the process. After that it seems like the entire group then just vanished off the face of the earth. A search of the entire region turned op no sign of them, and a sweep of their facility showed it to be eerily devoid of any answers, sitting there untouched as if someone would come home at any moment. There would be no further contact to their families and friends they had left behind.

Theories as to what happened to them would fly. Many thought they had gone off to commit a mass suicide much like the Heaven’s Gate cult, but there were found no bodies. Another was that they had simply gotten lost in the wilderness, but again no sign of them was found. They may also have been kidnapped in a region where kidnappings for ransoms are common, but no one ever came forward with a ransom demand. Even more sinister is the far-out idea that they actually managed to succeed in being whisked away by the aliens they so fervently believed in. As all of this speculation went on, some members of the cult did emerge to claim that they were not involved with UFOs, yet the 60 to 100 people remained missing. It is hard to know what happened after this, as the news on the matter has dried up and there are some who even claim it might have been a hoax and that it never happened at all. We do know it made the news at the time, but then it curiously sort of went away, the vanishing of 60 men, women, and children sort of quietly brushed under the carpet. What happened to these people? No one seems to really know, and it is a tragic and obscure oddity.

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