When four college professors, a geologist, a chemist, a physicist,
and a petroleum engineer, report seeing the same UFO's on fourteen
different occasions, the event can be classified as, at least,
unusual. Add the facts that hundreds of other people saw these UFO's
and that they were photographed, and the story gets even better. Add
a few more facts--that these UFO's were picked up on radar and that a
few people got a close look at one of them, and the story begins to
convince even the most ardent skeptics.
This was the situation the day the reports of the Lubbock Lights
arrived at ATIC. Actually the Lubbock Lights, as Project Blue Book
calls them, involved many widespread reports. Some of these incidents
are known to the public, but the ones that added the emphasis and
intrigue to the case and caused hundreds of hours of time to be spent
analyzing the reports have not been told before. We collected all of
these reports under the one title because there appeared to be a tie-
in between them.
The first word of the sightings reached ATIC late in September 1951,
when the mail girl dropped letters into my "in" basket. One of the
letters was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, one was from a small town
in Washington State, where I knew an Air Defense Command radar
station was located, and the other from Reese AFB at Lubbock, Texas.
I opened the Albuquerque letter first. It was a report from 34th Air
Defense at Kirtland AFB. The report said that on the evening of
August 25, 1951, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission's
supersecret Sandia Corporation and his wife had seen a UFO. About
dusk they were sitting in the back yard of their home on the
outskirts of Albuquerque. They were gazing at the night sky,
commenting on how beautiful it was, when both of them were startled
at the sight of a huge airplane flying swiftly and silently over
their home. The airplane had been in sight only a few seconds but
they had gotten a good look at it because it was so low. They
estimated 800 to 1,000 feet. It was the shape of a "flying wing" and
one and a half times the size of a B-36. The wing was sharply swept
back, almost like a V. Both the husband and wife had seen B-36's over
their home many times. They couldn't see the color of the UFO but
they did notice that there were dark bands running across the wing
from front to back. On the aft edge of the wings there were six to
eight pairs of soft, glowing, bluish lights. The aircraft had passed
over their house from north to south.
The report went on to say that an investigation had been made
immediately. Since the object might have been a conventional
airplane, air traffic was checked. A commercial airlines
Constellation was 50 miles west of Albuquerque and an Air Force B-25
was south of the city, but there had been nothing over Albuquerque
that evening. The man's background was checked. He had a "Q" security
clearance. This summed up his character, oddballs don't get "Q"
clearances. No one else had reported the UFO, but this could be
explained by the fact the AEC employee and his wife lived in such a
location that anything passing over their home from north to south
wouldn't pass over or near very many other houses. A sketch of the
UFO was enclosed in the report.
I picked up the letter from Lubbock next. It was a thick report, and
from the photographs that were attached, it looked interesting. I
thumbed through it and stopped at the photos. The first thing that
struck me was the similarity between these photos and the report I'd
just read. They showed a series of lights in a V shape, very similar
to those described as being on the aft edge of the "flying wing" that
was reported from Albuquerque. This was something unique, so I read
the report in detail.
On the night of August 25, 1951, about 9:20P.M., just twenty minutes
after the Albuquerque sighting, four college professors from Texas
Technological College at Lubbock had observed a formation of soft,
glowing, bluish-green lights pass over their home. Several hours
later they saw a similar group of lights and in the next two weeks
they saw at least ten more. On August 31 an amateur photographer had
taken five photos of the lights. Also on the thirty-first two ladies
had seen a large "aluminum-colored," "pear-shaped" object hovering
near a road north of Lubbock. The report went into the details of
these sightings and enclosed a set of the photos that had been taken.
This report, in itself, was a good UFO report, but the similarity to
the Albuquerque sighting, both in the description of the object and
the time that it was seen, was truly amazing.
I almost overlooked the report from the radar station because it was
fairly short. It said that early on the morning of August 26, only a
few hours after the Lubbock sighting, two different radars had shown
a target traveling 900 miles per hour at 13,000 feet on a
northwesterly heading. The target had been observed for six minutes
and an F-86 jet interceptor had been scrambled but by the time the F-
86 had climbed into the air the target was gone. The last paragraph
in the report was rather curt and to the point. It was apparently in
anticipation of the comments the report would draw. It said that the
target was not caused by weather. The officer in charge of the radar
station and several members of his crew had been operating radar for
seven years and they could recognize a weather target. This target
was real.
I quickly took out a map of the United States and drew in a course
line between Lubbock and the radar station. A UFO flying between
these two points would be on a northwesterly heading and the times it
was seen at the two places gave it a speed of roughly 900 miles per
hour.
This was by far the best combination of UFO reports I'd ever read
and I'd read every one in the Air Force's files.
The first thing I did after reading the reports was to rush a set of
the Lubbock photos to the intelligence officer of the 34th Air
Division in Albuquerque. I asked him to show the photos to the AEC
employee and his wife without telling them what they were. I
requested an answer by wire. Later the next day I received my answer:
"Observers immediately said that this is what they saw on the night
of 25 August. Details by airmail." The details were a sketch the man
and his wife had made of a wing around the photo of the Lubbock
Lights. The number of lights in the photo and the number of lights
the two observers had seen on the wing didn't tally, but they
explained this by saying that they could have been wrong in their
estimate.
The next day I flew to Lubbock to see if I could find an answer to
all of these mysterious happenings.
I arrived in Lubbock about 5:00P.M. and contacted the intelligence
officer at Reese AFB. He knew that I was on my way and had already
set up a meeting with the four professors. Right after dinner we met
them.
If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn't have
picked a more technically qualified group of people. They were:
Dr. W. I. Robinson, Professor of Geology.
Dr. A. G. Oberg, Professor of Chemical Engineering.
Professor W. L. Ducker, Head of the Petroleum Engineering Department.
Dr. George, Professor of Physics.
This is their story:
On the evening of August 25 the four men were sitting in Dr.
Robinson's back yard. They were discussing micrometeorites and
drinking tea. They jokingly stressed this point. At nine-twenty a
formation of lights streaked across the sky directly over their
heads. It all happened so fast that none of them had a chance to get
a good look. One of the men mentioned that he had always admonished
his students for not being more observant; now he was in that spot.
He and his colleagues realized they could remember only a few details
of what they had seen. The lights were a weird bluish-green color and
they were in a semicircular formation. They estimated that there were
from fifteen to thirty separate lights and that they were moving from
north to south. Their one wish at this time was that the lights would
reappear. They did; about an hour later the lights went over again.
This time the professors were a little better prepared. With the
initial shock worn off, they had time to get a better look. The
details they had remembered from the first flight checked. There was
one difference; in this flight the lights were not in any orderly
formation, they were just in a group.
The professors reasoned that if the UFO's appeared twice they might
come back. Come back they did. The next night and apparently many
times later, as the professors made twelve more observations during
the next few weeks. For these later sightings they added two more
people to their observing team.
Being methodical, as college professors are, they made every attempt
to get a good set of data. They measured the angle through which the
objects traveled and timed them. The several flights they checked
traveled through 90 degrees of sky in three seconds, or 30 degrees
per second. The lights usually suddenly appeared 45 degrees above the
northern horizon, and abruptly went out 45 degrees above the southern
horizon. They always traveled in this north-to-south direction.
Outside of the first flight, in which the objects were in a roughly
semicircular formation, in none of the rest of the flights did they
note any regular pattern. Two or three flights were often seen in one
night.
They had tried to measure the altitude, with no success. First they
tried to compare the lights to the height of clouds but the clouds
were never near the lights, or vice versa. Next they tried a more
elaborate scheme. They measured off a base line perpendicular to the
objects' usual flight path. Friends of the professors made up two
teams. Each of the two teams was equipped with elevation-measuring
devices, and one team was stationed at each end of the base line. The
two teams were linked together by two-way radios. If they sighted the
objects they would track and time them, thus getting the speed and
altitude.
Unfortunately neither team ever saw the lights. But the lights never
seemed to want to run the course. The wives of some of the watchers
claimed to have seen them from their homes in the city. This later
proved to be a clue.
The professors were not the sole observers of the mysterious lights.
For two weeks hundreds of other people for miles around Lubbock
reported that they saw the same lights. The professors checked many
of these reports against the times of the flights they had seen and
recorded, and many checked out close. They attempted to question
these observers as to the length of time they had seen the lights and
angles at which they had seen them, but the professors learned what I
already knew, people are poor observers.
Naturally there has been much discussion among the professors and
their friends as to the nature of the lights. A few simple
mathematical calculations showed that if the lights were very high
they would be traveling very fast. The possibility that they were
some natural phenomena was, of course, discussed and seriously
considered. The professors did a lot of thinking and research and
decided that if they were natural phenomena they were something
altogether new. Dr. George, who has since died, studied the phenomena
of the night sky during his years as a professor at the University of
Alaska, and he had never seen or heard of anything like this before.
This was the professors' story. It was early in the morning when we
returned to Reese AFB. I sat up a few more hours unsuccessfully
trying to figure out what they had seen.
The next day I again met the intelligence officer and we went to
talk to Carl Hart, Jr., the amateur photographer who had taken the
pictures of the lights. Hart was a freshman at Texas Tech. His story
was that on the night of August 31 he was lying in his bed in an
upstairs room of the Hart home. He, like everyone else in Lubbock,
had heard about the lights but he had never seen them. It was a warm
night and his bed was pushed over next to an open window. He was
looking out at the clear night sky, and had been in bed about a half
hour, when he saw a formation of the lights appear in the north,
cross an open patch of sky, and disappear over his house. Knowing
that the lights might reappear as they had done in the past, he
grabbed his loaded Kodak 35, set the lens and shutter at f 3.5 and
one tenth of a second, and went out into the middle of the back yard.
Before long his vigil was rewarded when the lights made a second
pass. He got two pictures. A third formation went over a few minutes
later and he got three more pictures. The next morning bright and
early Hart said he took the roll of unexposed film to a friend who
ran a photo-finishing shop. He explained that he did all of his film
processing in this friend's lab. He told the friend about the
pictures and they quickly developed them.
I stopped Hart at this point and asked why he didn't get more
excited about what could be the biggest news photos of the century.
He said that the lights had appeared to be so dim that he was sure he
didn't have anything on the negatives; had he thought that he did
have some good pictures he would have awakened his friend to develop
the negatives right away.
When he developed the negatives and saw that they showed an image,
his friend suggested that he call the newspaper. At first the paper
wasn't interested but then they decided to run the photos. I later
found out that they had done some checking of their own.
We went with Hart into his back yard to re-enact what had taken
place. He described the lights as being the same dull, glowing bluish-
green color as those seen by the professors. The formation was
different, however. The lights Hart saw were always flying in a
perfect V. He traced the path from where they appeared over some
trees in the north, through an open patch of sky over the back yard,
to a point where they disappeared over the house. From the flight
path he pointed out, the lights had crossed about 120 degrees of open
sky in four seconds. This 30-degree-per-second angular velocity
corresponded to the professors' measured angular velocity.
We made arrangements to borrow Hart's negatives, thanked him for his
information, and left.
Armed with a list of names of other observers of the mysterious
lights, the intelligence officer and I started out to try to get a
cross-section account of the other UFO sightings in the Lubbock area.
All the stories about the UFO's were the same; various types of
formations of dull bluish-green lights, generally moving north to
south. A few people had variations. One lady saw a flying Venetian
blind and another a flying double boiler. One point of interest was
that very few claimed to have seen the lights before reading the
professors' story in the paper, but this could get back to the old
question, "Do people look up if they have no reason to do so?"
We talked to observers in nearby towns. Their stories were the same.
Two of them, tower operators at an airport, reported that they had
seen the lights on several occasions.
It was in one of these outlying towns, Lamesa, that we talked to an
old gentleman, about eighty years old, who gave us a good lead. He
had seen the lights and he had identified them. Ever since he had
read the story in the papers he had been looking. One evening he and
his wife were in their yard looking for the lights. All of a sudden
two or three appeared. They were in view for several seconds, then
they were gone. In a few minutes the lights did a repeat performance.
The man admitted he had been scared. He broke off his story of the
lights and launched into his background as a native Texan, with range
wars, Indians, and stagecoaches under his belt. What he was trying to
point out was that despite the range wars, Indians, and stagecoaches,
he had been scared. His wife had been scared too. We had some
difficulty getting back to the lights but we finally made it. The
third time they came around, he said, one of the lights emitted a
sound. It said, "Plover." The old gentleman had immediately
identified it as a plover, a water bird about the size of a quail.
Later that night, and on several other occasions, they had seen the
same thing. After a few more hair-raising but interesting stories of
the old west Texas, we left.
Our next stop was the federal game warden's office in Lubbock. We
got the low-down on plovers. We explained our interest and the warden
was very helpful. He had been around west Texas all of his life so he
was familiar with wildlife. The oily white breast of a plover could
easily reflect light, but plovers usually didn't travel in more than
pairs, or three at the most. He had never seen or heard of them
traveling in a flock of fifteen to thirty but, of course, this wasn't
impossible. Ducks, yes, but probably not plovers. He did say that for
some unknown reason there were more than the usual number of plovers
in the area that fall.
I was anxious to get the negatives that Hart had lent us back to the
photo lab at Wright Field, but I had one more call to make. I wanted
to talk to the two ladies who had seen a strange object hovering near
their car, but I also wanted to write my report before I left
Lubbock. Two Air Force special investigators from Reese AFB offered
to talk to the ladies, so I stayed at the air base and finished my
report.
That night when the investigators came back, I got the story. They
had spent the whole day talking to the ladies and doing a little
discreet checking into their backgrounds.
The two ladies, a mother and her daughter, had left their home in
Matador, Texas, 70 miles northeast of Lubbock, about twelve-thirty
P.M. on August 31. They were driving along in their car when they
suddenly noticed "a pear-shaped" object about 150 yards ahead of
them. It was just off the side of the road, about 120 feet in the
air. It was drifting slowly to the east, "less than the speed
required to take off in a Cub airplane." They drove on down the road
about 50 more yards, stopped, and got out of the car. The object,
which they estimated to be the size of a B-29 fuselage, was still
drifting along slowly. There was no sign of any exhaust blast and
they heard no noise, but they did see a "porthole" in the side of the
object. In a few seconds the object began to pick up speed and
rapidly climb out of sight. As it climbed it seemed to have a tight
spiraling motion.
The investigation showed that the two ladies were "solid citizens,"
with absolutely no talents, or reasons, for fabricating such a story.
The daughter was fairly familiar with aircraft. Her husband was an
Air Force officer then in Korea, and she had been living near air
bases for several years. The ladies had said that the object was
"drifting" to the east, which possibly indicated that it was moving
with the wind, but on further investigation it was found that it was
moving _into_ the wind.
The two investigators had worked all day and hadn't come up with the
slightest indication of an answer.
This added the final section to my now voluminous report on the
Lubbock affair.
The next morning as I rode to the airport to catch an airliner back
to Dayton I tried to put the whole puzzle together. It was hard to
believe that all Fd heard was real. Did a huge flying wing pass over
Albuquerque and travel 250 miles to Lubbock in about fifteen minutes?
This would be about 900 miles per hour. Did the radar station in
Washington pick up the same thing? I'd checked the distances on the
big wall map in flight operations just before leaving Reese AFB. It
was 1,300 miles from Lubbock to the radar site. From talking to
people, we decided that the lights were apparently still around
Lubbock at 11:20P.M. and the radar picked them up just after
midnight. They would have had to be traveling about 780 miles per
hour. This was fairly close to the 900-mile-per-hour speed clocked by
the two radars. The photos of the Lubbock Lights checked with the
description of what the AEC employee and his wife had seen in
Albuquerque. Nobody in Lubbock, however, had reported seeing a
"flying wing" with lights. All of this was swimming around in my mind
when I stepped out of the staff car at the Lubbock airport.
My plane had already landed so I checked in at the ticket counter,
picked up a morning paper, and ran out and got into the airplane. I
sat down next to a man wearing a Stetson hat and cowboy boots. I soon
found out he was a retired rancher from Lubbock.
On the front page of the paper was an account of a large meteor that
had flashed across New Mexico, west Texas, and Oklahoma the night
before. According to the newspaper account, it was very spectacular
and had startled a good many people in Lubbock. I was interested in
the story because I had seen this meteor. It was a spectacular sight
and I could easily understand how such things could be called UFO's.
My seat partner must have noticed that I was reading the story of the
meteor because he commented that a friend of his, the man who had
brought him to the airport, had seen it. We talked about the meteor.
This led to a discussion of other odd happenings and left a perfect
opening for him to bring up the Lubbock Lights. He asked me if I'd
heard about them. I said that I had heard a few vague stories. I
hoped that this would stave off any detailed accounts of stories I
had been saturated with during the past five days, but it didn't. I
heard all the details all over again.
As he talked on, I settled back in my seat waiting for a certain
thing to happen. Pretty soon it came. The rancher hesitated and the
tone of his voice changed to a half-proud, half-apologetic tone. I'd
heard this transition many times in the past few months; he was going
to tell about the UFO that he had seen. He was going to tell how he
had seen the bluish-green lights. I was wrong; what he said knocked
me out of my boredom.
The same night that the college professors had seen their formation
of lights his wife had seen something. Nobody in Lubbock knew about
the story, not even their friends. He didn't want anyone to think he
and his wife were "crazy." He was telling me only because I was a
stranger. Just after dark his wife had gone outdoors to take some
sheets off the clothesline. He was inside the house reading the
paper. Suddenly his wife had rushed into the house, as he told the
story, "as white as the sheets she was carrying." As close as he
could remember, he said, this was about ten minutes before the
professors made their first sighting. He stopped at this point to
tell me about his wife, she wasn't prone to be "flighty" and she
"never made up tales." This character qualification was also standard
for UFO storytellers. The reason his wife was so upset was that she
had seen a large object glide swiftly and silently over the house.
She said it looked like "an airplane without a body." On the back
edge of the wing were pairs of glowing bluish lights. The Albuquerque
sighting! He said he didn't have any idea what his wife had seen but
he thought that it was an interesting story.
It _was_ an interesting story. It hit me right between the eyes. I
knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the
Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew
about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were
infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard
Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in
Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar
UFO during this period and hesitated to mention it.
I tried to get a few more facts from the rancher but he'd told me
all he knew. At Dallas I boarded an airliner to Dayton and he went on
to Baton Rouge, never knowing what he'd added to the story of the
Lubbock Lights.
On the way to Dayton I figured out a plan of attack on the thousands
of words of notes I'd taken. The best thing to do, I decided, was to
treat each sighting in the Lubbock Light series as a separate
incident. All of them seemed to be dependent upon each other for
importance. If the objects that were reported in several of the
incidents could be identified, the rest would merely become average
UFO reports. The photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr., became number
one on the agenda.
As soon as I reached Dayton I took Hart's negatives to the Photo
Reconnaissance Laboratory at Wright Field. This laboratory, staffed
by the Air Force's top photography experts, did all of our analysis
of photographs. They went right to work on the negatives and soon had
a report.
There had originally been five negatives, but when we asked to
borrow them Hart could only produce four. The negatives were badly
scratched and dirty because so many people had handled them, so it
was difficult to tell the actual photographic images from the dust
spots and scratches. The first thing that the lab did was to look at
each spot on the negatives to see if it was an actual photographic
image. They found that the photos showed an inverted V formation of
lights. In each photo the individual image of a light was badly
blurred due to motion of the camera, but by careful scrutiny of each
blurred image they were able to determine that the original lights
that Hart had photographed were circular, near pinpoint sources of
light. Like a bright star, or a distant light bulb. Next they made
enlargements from the negatives and carefully plotted the position of
each light in the formation.
In each photograph the individual lights in the formation shifted
position according to a definite pattern.
One additional factor that was brought out in the report was that
although the photos were taken on a clear night no images of the
stars could be found in the background. This proved one thing, the
lights, which were overexposed in the photograph, were a great deal
brighter than the stars, or the lights affected the film more than
the light from the stars.
This was all that the photos showed. It was impossible to determine
the size of each image of the group, speed, or altitude.
The next thing was to try to duplicate what Hart said he had done. I
enlisted the aid of several friends and we tried to photograph a
moving light. When we were talking to Hart in Lubbock, he had taken
us to his back yard, where he had shot the pictures. He had traced
the flight path of fights across the sky. We had him estimate the
speed by following an imaginary flight of lights across the sky. It
came out to about four seconds. We had a camera identical to the one
that Hart had used and set up a light to move at the same speed as
the UFO's had flown. We tried to take photographs. In four seconds we
could get only two poor shots. These were badly blurred, much worse
than Hart's, due to the one-tenth-of-a-second shutter speed. We
repeated our experiment several times, each time with the same
results. This made a lot of people doubt the authenticity of Hart's
photos.
With the completed photo lab report in my hands, I was still without
an answer. The report was interesting but didn't prove anything. All
I could do was to get opinions from as qualified sources as I could
find. A physiologist at the Aeromedical Laboratory knocked out the
timing theory immediately by saying that if Hart had been excited he
could have easily taken three photos in four seconds if we could get
two in four seconds in our experiment. Several professional
photographers, one of them a top _Life_ photographer, said that if
Hart was familiar with his camera and was familiar with panning
action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours. I
recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed sporting
events for the Lubbock newspaper. This would have called for a good
panning technique.
The photographs didn't tally with the description of the lights that
the professors had seen; in fact, they were firmly convinced that
they were of "home manufacture." The professors had reported soft,
glowing lights yet the photos showed what should have been extremely
bright lights. Hart reported a perfect formation while the
professors, except for the first flight, reported an unorderly group.
There was no way to explain this disagreement in the arrangement of
the lights. Of course, it wasn't impossible that on the night that
Hart saw the lights they were flying in a V formation. The first time
the professors saw them they were flying in a semicircle.
The intensity of the lights was difficult to explain. Again I went
to the people in the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory. I asked them if
there was any possible situation that could cause this. They said
yes. An intensely bright light source which had a color far over in
the red end of the spectrum, bordering on infrared, could do it. The
eye is not sensitive to such a light, it could appear dim to the eye
yet be "bright" to the film. I asked them what kind of a light source
would cause this. There were several things, if you want to
speculate, they said, extremely high temperatures for one. But this
was as far as they would go. We have nothing in this world that flies
that appears dim to the eye yet will show bright on film, they said.
This ended the investigation of the photographs, and the
investigation ended at a blank wall. My official conclusion, which
was later given to the press, was that "The photos were never proven
to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine." There is no
definite answer.
The emphasis of the investigation was now switched to the
professors' sighting. The meager amount of data that they had
gathered seemed to be accurate but it was inconclusive as far as
getting a definite answer was concerned. They had measured two
things, how much of the sky the objects had crossed in a certain time
and the angle from one side of the formation to the other. These
figures didn't mean a great deal, however, since the altitude at
which the formation of lights was flying was unknown. If you assumed
that the objects were flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet you could
easily compute that they were traveling about 3,600 miles per hour,
or five to six times the speed of sound. The formation would have
been about 1,750 feet wide. If each light was a separate object it
could have been in the neighborhood of 100 feet in diameter. These
figures were only a guess since nobody knew if the lights were at,
above, or below 10,000 feet. If they had been higher they would have
been going faster and have been larger. If lower than 10,000 feet,
slower and smaller.
The only solid lead that had developed while the Reese AFB
intelligence officer and I were investigating the professors'
sightings was that the UFO's were birds reflecting the city lights;
specifically plover. The old cowboy from Lamesa had described
something identical to what the professors described and they were
plover. Secondly, whenever the professors left the vicinity of their
homes to look for the lights they didn't see them, yet their wives,
who stayed at home, did see them. If the "lights" were birds they
would be flying low and couldn't be seen from more than a few hundred
feet. While in Lubbock I'd noticed several main boulevards lighted
with the bluish mercury vapor lights. I called the intelligence
officer at Reese AFB and he airmailed me a city map of Lubbock with
the mercury-vapor-lighted streets marked. The place where the
professors had made their observations was close to one of these
streets. The big hitch in this theory was that people living miles
from a mercury-vapor-lighted boulevard had also reported the lights.
How many of these sightings were due to the power of suggestion and
how many were authentic I didn't know. If I could have found out, it
would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if
they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be
an answer. This, however, it was impossible to do.
The fact that the lights didn't make any perceivable sound seemed as
if it might be a clue. Birds or light phenomena wouldn't make any
sound, but how about some object of appreciable size traveling at or
above the speed of sound? Jet airplanes don't fly as fast as the
speed of sound but they make a horrible roar. Artillery shells, which
are going much faster than aircraft, whine as they go through the
air. I knew that a great deal of the noise from a jet is due to the
heated air rushing out of the tail pipe, but I didn't know exactly
how much of the noise this caused. If a jet airplane with a silent
engine could be built, how much noise would it make? How far could it
be heard? To get the answer I contacted National Advisory Committee
for Aeronautics Laboratory at Langley AFB, a government agency which
specializes in aeronautical research. They didn't know. Neither they
nor anybody else had ever done any research on this question. Their
opinion was that such an aircraft could not be heard 5,000 or 10,000
feet away. Aerodynamicists at Wright Field's Aircraft Laboratory
agreed.
I called the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratories at Aberdeen
Proving Grounds, Maryland, to find out why artillery shells whine.
These people develop and test all kinds of shells so they would have
an answer if anybody did. They said that the majority of the whine of
an artillery shell is probably caused by the flat back end of the
shell. If a perfectly streamlined shell could be used it would not
have any perceivable whine.
What I found out, or didn't find out, about the sound of an object
moving at several times the speed of sound was typical of nearly
every question that came up regarding UFO's. We were working in a
field where there were no definite answers to questions. In some
instances we were getting into fields far advanced above the then
present levels of research. In other instances we were getting into
fields where no research had been done at all. It made the problem of
UFO analysis one of getting opinions. All we could do was hope the
opinions we were getting were the best.
My attempts to reach a definite conclusion as to what the professors
had seen met another blank wall. I had no more success than I'd had
trying to reach a conclusion on the authenticity of the photographs.
A thorough analysis of the reports of the flying wings seen by the
retired rancher's wife in Lubbock and the AEC employee and his wife
in Albuquerque was made. The story from the two ladies who saw the
aluminum-colored pear-shaped object hovering near the road near
Matador, Texas, was studied, checked, and rechecked. Another blank
wall on all three of these sightings.
By the time I got around to working on the report from the radar
station in Washington State, the data of the weather conditions that
existed on the night of the sighting had arrived. I turned the
incident folder over to the electronics specialists at ATIC. They
made the analysis and determined that the targets were caused by
weather, although it was a borderline case. They further surmised
that since the targets had been picked up on two radars, if I checked
I'd find out that the two targets looked different on the two
radarscopes. This is a characteristic of a weather target picked up
on radars operating on different frequencies. I did check. I called
the radar station and talked to the captain who was in charge of the
crew the night the target had been picked up.
The target looked the same on both scopes. This was one of the
reasons it had been reported, the captain told me. If the target
hadn't been the same on both scopes, he wouldn't have made the report
since he would have thought he had a weather target. He asked me what
ATIC thought about the sighting. I said that Captain James thought it
was weather. Just before the long-distance wires between Dayton and
Washington melted, I caught some comment about people sitting in
swivel chairs miles from the closest radarscope. . . . I took it that
he didn't agree the target was caused by weather. But that's the way
it officially stands today.
Although the case of the Lubbock Lights is officially dead, its
memory lingers on. There have never been any more reliable reports of
"flying wings" but lights somewhat similar to those seen by the
professors have been reported. In about 70 per cent of these cases
they were proved to be birds reflecting city lights.
The known elements of the case, the professors' sightings and the
photos, have been dragged back and forth across every type of paper
upon which written material appears, from the cheapest, coarsest pulp
to the slick _Life_ pages. Saucer addicts have studied and offered
the case as all-conclusive proof, with photos, that UFO's are
interplanetary. Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard studied the case and
ripped the sightings to shreds in _Look_, _Time_, and his book,
_Flying_ _Saucers_, with the theory that the professors were merely
looking at refracted city lights. But none of these people even had
access to the full report. This is the first time it has ever been
printed.
The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the
complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their
associations with the government, had complete access to our files.
And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyed fanatics, they
were scientists--rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence
experts. They had banded together to study our UFO reports because
they were convinced that some of the UFO's that were being reported
were interplanetary spaceships and the Lubbock series was one of
these reports. The fact that the formations of lights were in
different shapes didn't bother them; in fact, it convinced them all
the more that their ideas of how a spaceship might operate were
correct.
This group of scientists believed that the spaceships, or at least
the part of the spaceship that came relatively close to the earth,
would have to have a highly swept-back wing configuration. And they
believed that for propulsion and control the craft had a series of
small jet orifices all around its edge. Various combinations of these
small jets would be turned on to get various flight attitudes. The
lights that the various observers saw differed in arrangement because
the craft was flying in different flight attitudes.
(Three years later the Canadian Government announced that this was
exactly the way that they had planned to control the flying saucer
that they were trying to build. They had to give up their plans for
the development of the saucer-like craft, but now the project has
been taken over by the U.S. Air Force.)
This is the complete story of the Lubbock Lights as it is carried in
the Air Force files, one of the most interesting and most
controversial collection of UFO sightings ever to be reported to
Project Blue Book. Officially all of the sightings, except the UFO
that was picked up on radar, are unknowns.
Personally I thought that the professors' lights might have been
some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street
lights, but I was wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't refracted
light, but they weren't spaceships. The lights that the professors
saw--the backbone of the Lubbock Light series--have been positively
identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural
phenomenon.
It is very unfortunate that I can't divulge exactly the way the
answer was found because it is an interesting story of how a
scientist set up complete instrumentation to track down the lights
and how he spent several months testing theory after theory until he
finally hit upon the answer. Telling the story would lead to his
identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete
anonymity. But he fully convinced me that he had the answer, and
after having heard hundreds of explanations of UFO's, I don't
convince easily.
With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights "solved"--the
sightings by the professors--the other phases become only good UFO
reports.