(KSN) This remote semi-desert area in southwest Texas has become famous for the Marfa Lights, strange flying and dancing lights that return several times each year. Edson Hendricks, a scientist living in California, is reported to have related the following about a sighting he had in February, 1991:

“I was puzzled by this light, but I had not yet been able to decide whether I might be seeing another automobile headlight.  And then, as I stared with great surprise, the light divided into two separate lights which continued to move southward and gradually drew apart. . . . As I continued to watch what was now a pair of lights, the leftmost one (to the south) flickered a bit, quickly increased brightness, and divided again.  At the same moment, the rightmost light of the original pair (to the north) abruptly changed direction, began to move away to the north accelerating to a speed much greater than any automobile headlights I’d observed earlier . . .”

Another scientist in California, Jonathan Whitcomb, has suggested the possibility that Marfa Lights are caused by large bioluminescent flying predators.

(KSN) It may not be for all teenagers, but for at least a few of them one cure for boredom is active involvement in cryptozoology, in particular living-pterosaur investigations. In the nonfiction cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America (second edition), two young investigators have become passionately active in flying cryptids: Peter Theiss of Florida and Phillip O’Donnell of Oregon.

Twelve-year-old Peter Theiss interviewed an eyewitness who had witnessed an apparent living pterosaur flying over a neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. Teenager Phillip O’Donnell, himself an eyewitness of a strange winged creature a few years earlier, wrote his own cryptozoology book: Dinosaurs, Dead or Alive. Both those young men have some of their experiences recorded in Jonathan Whitcomb’s cryptozoology book.

(KSN) Texas pterosaurs, or “pterodactyls,” not fossils but apparently still living, are still in the news. Recent news, however, involves Marfa Lights, not direct sightings of apparent living pterosaurs. Those ghost lights of southwest Texas have mystified residents for generations. The live-pterosaur interpretation seems speculative, at best, but no non-living explanation seems to satisfy the strange dancing behavior of those mystery lights.

(PRNewswire) . . . In southwest Texas, local residents have speculated about dancing devils or ghosts. Scientists have preferred something along the lines of ball lightning or earthlights, but all their scientific explanations have tripped over the resemblances to line dancing. If atmospheric energies or tectonic stresses cause the displays, why do two lights horizontally separate for a long distance before coming back together?

Now a cryptozoologist from California has explained the dancing lights of Marfa. Tales of spooks may hold a spark of truth, for recent research implies intelligence directs the lights: Bioluminescent flying predators may be hunting at night and catching a few unlucky Big Brown Bats: Eptesicus fuscus.

. . . Although Whitcomb admits that Marfa Lights may come from an unknown bioluminescent bird or bat, he says, “It is more likely than not from a creature similar to the ropen of Papua New Guinea, and my associates and I are sure about the ropen: It is a pterosaur.”