One evening during our stay in Alpine, Texas USA, as sundown was nearing my wife and I drove west of Alpine about 20 miles to see the Mystery Lights at Marfa http://www.theoutlaws.com/unexplained3.htm which we'd learned about from tourist pamphlets listing local attractions. I did no research on the lights before we went just so I'd be surprised by what we saw, if anything.
We arrived at the viewing deck in due course, checked it out, then went back to sit in the truck due to the cold that had blown in from the north during the day. While sitting there, shortly after the sun went down and daylight was fading we noticed what we thought were headlights on a distant range of mountains, but when several more lights appeared and none were moving as cars would have been, we went back to the viewing deck to see if the people there knew anything. And despite the cold and the fact this viewing deck is out in the middle of nowhere, there were quite a number of people there.
As it turned out, what we had seen were indeed the mystery lights and I have to say they weren't at all what I was expecting, which was something more along the lines of a nebulous or gaseous kind of vague light. However, what we saw were bright points of light along the side of the mountains and for the most part the lights didn't move, just kind of slowly came on, burned for a few seconds, then quickly faded or flickered out. But all this varied and at times there were no lights visible while at other times there might have been as many as 7 or 8.
Sightings of the lights were first recorded back in the late 1800s by pioneers and long before that by natives and it is hard to believe that something as bright as the lights we saw can't be tracked down and their source revealed, but that is apparently the case. These lights were even featured about 15 years ago on NBC's popular TV show Unsolved Mysteries and have been researched by people from around the world and so far no one has come up with a plausible explanation. After seeing them, I sure don't have one.
The photo above that I took of the lights was a 30 second exposure and the lights appear to be along a line going down the mountain, rather like a road would or a strata layer, but when viewing them with the eye they were simply bright points of light that appeared seemingly at random.
The red light on the left of the photo is a beacon and helps locate the area where the lights appear, generally to the right of it, so any other lights you see on the mountainside are the mystery lights. The really bright one on the right was one of the quite intense ones and considering those mountains were miles away, up close that light would have had to be blinding. That the source of these lights still remains a mystery is as much a mystery to me as the lights themselves. They were indeed most puzzling.