What Causes the Marfa Lights of Southwest Texas? Living Pterosaurs? Maybe Ghost lights? Miracle Lights? A new explanation for the mysterious flying Marfa Lights comes from a strange source: a cryptozoologist in California, who writes nonfiction books about modern living pterosaurs. Jonathan Whitcomb, of Long Beach, CA, wrote a press release about Marfa Lights, suggesting they might be related to the ropen lights of Papua New Guinea, what some cryptozoologists believe are from long-tailed bioluminescent pterosaurs. (See Marfa Lights predators) From that press release: “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.” In the book Hunting Marfa Lights, on page 43, we read of the author’s first encounter: “Soon after dark we saw two strange lights on a compass-bearing almost due south [from us]. These lights pulsed independently and seemed to follow a randomly timed sequence that, in most cases, went from dark to relatively dim, flared to a higher level of brightness, then dimmed and eventually went out. Sometimes both lights would be on at the same time.” Although the author of Hunting Marfa Lights, James Bunnell, does not write about the flying-predator possibility, many of the sighting reports in his book led Jonathan Whitcomb, the author of Live Pterosaurs in America (second edition) to believe flying predators are the answer. The second edition of Whitcomb’s book has one chapter on Marfa Lights. In that cryptozoology book (not the one by Bunnell), the biological idea is explained in detail, regardless of common assumptions about pterosaur extinction. In the book “Hunting Marfa Lights,” James Bunnell tells us a little about his Uncle John, who said that he knew what Marfa Lights were. Why did Uncle John not tell his nephew what the Marfa Lights are? Could he have known that they were a group of strange bioluminescent flying creatures? Maybe. Ghost Lights of Marfa, Texas, Explained From page 79 of the second edition of Live Pterosaurs in America, we read, “Near the MLVP, Hendricks saw a light come down and move about in the nearby bushes, like an animal would. In the morning, he searched those bushes but found nothing. I suspect that Hendricks had witnessed a ropen-like nocturnal flying predator that was chasing a Big Brown Bat.”