Hey Blender Artists, I am having a problem with making strobe lights (i.e. Runway lights). I tried to use a particle texture, and have it shrink in scale, and have it play an ipo, but unfortunately, it hasn’t shaped well to my perception. I am open to any suggestions. Thanks 
You could try animating the colA channel and enabling object color in the material properties. You might need to be in GLSL mode to do that though.
this is exactly right, but you dont need to be in GLSL to do it, just go to the material buttons, enable, “ZTransp” and then move to keyframe one, then press the i key, select alpha from the drop down menu, and move the key frame to lets say 5, move the “alpha” slider down to zero, press i and select “alpha”, and again set the keyframe to 10, and then move the alpha slider to 1.00(full) and then again press i and select alpha, then put the logic bricks like in the image. hopw this helps
