St. Elmo's Fire, ball lightning, the ignition of emitted natural methane, rockreflected moonlight, energized particles that rain down from the Van Allen Radiation Belts, a top secret Air Force project (a small USAF tethered balloon radar outpost lies just outside of Marfa), and all sorts of derivations and combinations of the aforementioned. Knowing that the atmosphere works in strange and complex ways, I wondered if mirages make the lights dance and bounce so mysteriously.\n The actual mechanisms of the superior mirage can be far more complicated than simple downward refraction; Young explained a "duct" in which refracted light rays cross one another at intervals governed by the thermal gradient of the inversion, where a viewer will see either an erect or inverted form of the miraged object. BELIEVERS REMAIN There are other types of refraction forms that I think could be possible culprits in tricking wouldbe and willing extraterrestrial abductees to drive to Marfa to see the lights, such as the mock mirage, where a viewer sees a mirage from above an inversion layer, or the refractive (but non-mirage) effect of looming; where headlights far beyond the horizon rise into the sky; or towering, another nonmirage phenomenon, where distant car headlights "stretch" into the sky.