The area around Marfa, Texas, is very arid but there are some nearby ranches that raise cattle, whose diet includes a subspecies of a desert scrub plant, Devil’s Paintbox. Various chemical properties in the plant make bovine flatulence especially volatile, often resulting in a small, colorful explosions when the cows emit gas. Cow farts light up, in other words.

That’s the scientific explanation for the Marfa Lights, which people in the region have reporting seeing, going back all the way to a young cowboy in the 1880s. Or it could be, if I hadn’t made all that up, except for the part about the cowboy.

I’m not going to make a close study of the Marfa Lights, but will note that people do seem to see them, and sober opinion chalks it up to optics. Literal optics, not the kind politicians fret about.

East of Marfa, along the highway US 90, the country looks like this.

A few miles out of town, that same highway has an unusual rest stop. Unique in the world, if you think about it. We stopped to take a look. I’d stopped by in ’18, and wanted to share that 10-minute experience with Yuriko.

“In 2003 the town [of Marfa] used $720,000 from the federal government and the Texas Department of Transportation to expand that area into the Marfa Mystery Lights Viewing Center,” says Texas Monthly.

Whatever the truth of the lights, that’s an unusually creative thing for a municipal government to do.