Southwest, and many persons spent the evening in the relative coolness
out of doors. In the town of Lubbock, a professor of geology was
sitting in his yard with two guests, fellow members of the faculty,
discussing micrometeorites and counting meteors, which for several
nights had been more numerous than usual. The sky was clear and
cloudless and seeing conditions were ideal. About 9:20 the men noticed
a group of fifteen to twenty lights passing silently overhead, going
from north to south. They were obviously not meteors or planes, but
disappeared too quickly to be identified. About an hour later a second
group of lights appeared, forming a rough semicircle or crescent like a
string of beads. Shortly before midnight a third group soared overhead
in a random pattern (see Figure 11).
[Illustration: _Figure 11._ Schematic sketch of lights observed by the
professors at Lubbock, Texas. Left, pattern in the first and third
sightings; right, pattern in the second sighting.]
Trying to account for the phenomenon, the men agreed that all three
flights had appeared suddenly, not gradually, in about the same part of
the sky. Only the second had shown any sort of pattern, all had moved
silently from north to south, their luminosity was not constant but had
varied in intensity, and all had disappeared suddenly, not gradually,
at about the same point in the sky. The men did not agree on the color,
which they described as yellowish to white, with a soft glow. The
lights had passed too swiftly for the men to locate them in relation to
specific stars and there were no clouds in the sky; thus they had no
known reference points by which to judge altitude, distance, or size.
Since the lights had apparently moved over about 30 degrees of sky in
one second, however, and the observers estimated the altitude as 5000
to 50,000 feet, the unknowns must have had an enormous size and an
incredible speed of from 1800 to 18,000 miles an hour--typical flying
saucers.
Understandably curious, the host telephoned the managing editor of
the local newspaper, the Lubbock _Evening Avalanche_, hoping that a
printed account would elicit more information from other persons who
had noticed the mysterious lights. The report appeared in the Sunday
paper, August 26, but in the days that followed, no reader responded.
Then on Friday August 31, five days after the original story had
appeared and apparently died, it suddenly came to life. A college
freshman who occasionally sold news photographs to the Lubbock paper
brought in five pictures of a group of mysterious lights he had
photographed the night before. He had been lying in bed next to an open
window, he explained, and shortly before midnight he had observed a
formation of brilliant lights moving rapidly across the sky. Grabbing
his camera, a Kodak 35-mm., he had rushed out into the yard and, after
a brief wait, had been able to photograph two similar flights that
raced overhead a few minutes apart. Each light had been brighter than
Venus, they had maintained a perfect V formation, and had sped from
horizon to horizon in a mere four or five seconds. Yet this amazing
apparition had apparently gone unnoticed by all except the lucky
amateur.
Fearing a hoax, both the editor and the staff photographer hesitated
but, since the negatives displayed no obvious evidence of fraud, they
finally bought and printed the pictures and distributed them over the
country through the United Press.
People all over the nation could now argue the question: What were the
Lubbock lights? A few said flying saucers. Many Texans said ducks,
plover, or other migratory fowl. But the things in the pictures didn’t
look like birds; and if they weren’t birds, what were they? Some
persons bluntly called them a hoax.
Impelled perhaps by the growing publicity, the staff photographer of
the _Evening Avalanche_ several times tried to duplicate the pictures
by photographing flights of birds at night. He allowed himself better
equipment--a Speedgraphic camera loaded with a tungsten ASA 80 film,
and a GE no. 22 flashbulb in a concentrating reflector. Opening
the camera to f 4.7 at 1/10 second, he went up to the roof of the
newspaper building to try his luck. After a brief wait he was able to
photograph a flock of birds that appeared high overhead, reflecting the
mercury-vapor lights of the street, flying noiselessly in a “ragged” V
formation, but the image on the negative proved too faint for use. The
next night he tried again, using a Kodak Reflex set at f 3.5, Super XX
film, at 1/10 second, plus the flashbulb and concentrating reflector.
The birds appeared on schedule, but again the images proved too faint
for use. The experimenter concluded, probably correctly, that the
amateur must have photographed something much brighter than birds.
Not until late October, nearly two months after the original incident,
did the Air Force receive official notice of the mystery at Lubbock,
and Captain Ruppelt of ATIC arrived to interview witnesses in Lubbock
and the neighboring towns of Lamessa, Brownfield, and Big Spring. He
quickly discovered that he had two mysteries to solve instead of one
since, according to the witnesses who had started all the excitement,
the objects shown in the pictures were wholly unlike the luminous
phenomena observed by the three professors. The pictured lights formed
a perfectly geometrical, flat V, while the original objects had formed
a random pattern. Furthermore the pictures showed brilliant, sharply
outlined lights as intense as unshaded electric bulbs, while the
original objects had been softly glowing.
Meanwhile the professors themselves had been trying to solve their own
mystery. During September and October they had observed at least a
dozen similar flights, and in an attempt to obtain the true altitude
of the objects they had organized a field survey, operating in the
country to achieve better seeing conditions. Two groups of observers
were stationed at two different points, a measured distance apart,
with radio communication between the two. By making simultaneous
observations, they hoped to calculate the true height of the objects
and thus obtain accurate estimates of size and speed. This well-planned
experiment failed because the lights never appeared to the watchers in
the country even on nights when they were clearly visible in the town.
Nevertheless the scientists did establish one fact: the altitude could
not be as high as 50,000 feet, their original estimate. An astronomer
in the group, calculating from the few data available, showed that the
height must have been only 2000 to 3000 feet, less than a tenth of the
first estimate.
Continuing his investigation, Captain Ruppelt found that other persons
had seen the lights on the night of August 25--and identified them.
At Brownfield, Texas, some thirty miles from Lubbock, a rancher and his
wife had been sitting in their back yard when they noticed a group of
fifteen to twenty lights flying overhead from north to south, silently,
in no particular formation. They appeared to be very high and had “a
kind of glow, a little bigger than a star.” Some time later a second
group flew over. When a third group appeared, flying lower, he could
see that they were birds; as they moved on to the south and one of the
birds emitted a cry, he recognized the familiar call of the plover.
Plover have a wing span of a foot and their oily white breasts form an
excellent surface for reflecting the lights beneath them.
Like most old-time residents of the area, the rancher was accustomed
to the yearly exodus of migratory fowl. Traveling at night in groups
of six to twenty, they usually flew at 1000 feet or lower at a maximum
speed of about fifty miles an hour in the weeks from late August to
mid-November. The rancher had read about the professors’ sighting,
which sounded exactly like his own. It would have baffled him, too, he
said, if he had not gotten a good look when the third flight circled
the house and if he had not happened to hear the single call.
Another resident reported, much later, that he had often seen such
lights and recognized them as birds. One night he had noticed “a
formation of ducks pass over so low that you could actually see the
whole bodies with their shiny white undersides glowing.” At other times
he had seen ducks flying at low altitudes with only the undersides
glowing and creating an illusion of objects moving very fast at a high
altitude[VI-9].
In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the original objects had
been birds, probably plover, reflecting the city’s lights, Captain
Ruppelt chose to regard them as mysterious and listed the professors’
sighting as an Unknown. Several years later he wrote that a natural
explanation did exist but, for some reason, he had promised not
to divulge it[VI-7, p. 150]. Still later, he asserted without
amplification that the lights had been night-flying moths reflecting
the bluish green of mercury-vapor street lights[VI-10, p. 276]--a
surprising anticlimax, in view of his earlier secrecy. In a reanalysis
of the facts made in 1959, Major (now Lieutenant Colonel) R. J. Friend
of ATIC and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, science consultant, determined beyond
doubt that the objects had been plover.
_The Lubbock Pictures_
The problem of the photographs remained. In Dayton, Air Force experts
studied the four available negatives.
The photographer had used a Kodak 35-mm. camera, lens at 3.5, Plus-X
film, and an exposure time of 1/10 second. The negatives were badly
scratched and dirty from much handling. According to the photographer’s
story, each flight of unknowns had moved from horizon to horizon in
four to five seconds and had passed directly overhead; he had “panned”
his camera with the movement of the objects and had managed to snap two
pictures during one flight and three during the next.
Analysis yielded no suggestion that the negatives had been tampered
with but they offered no clue to the background, identity, height,
distance, or speed of the things shown. The images themselves, however,
aroused some doubts. Each frame showed twenty bright spots against a
uniform dark background. No trace of stars or starlight could be found,
although the sky that night had been clear and cloudless. The spots
showed evidence of slight motion during the exposure but the amount of
blurring was amazingly slight, considering the speed with which the
photographer claimed to have moved his Kodak. Professional cameramen
tried repeatedly to duplicate the performance, but failed. The most
successful try produced only two pictures, badly blurred, in four
seconds.
The most crucial discrepancy between negatives and story, however,
was revealed by the pattern of the spots, which formed a flat V.
The orientation of the V was the same on all the negatives. If the
formation had actually passed directly overhead and the photographer
had panned with it, as he claimed, then he must have taken all his
pictures either as the lights approached him or as they receded. If
he had taken two successive pictures, one as the formation approached
and the next as it receded, the V would have reversed position in
the second picture--V would have changed to ∧--unless he had managed
to stand on his head while taking the second picture. And if he had
actually taken all his pictures either as the lights approached or as
they receded, he had performed the incredible feat of obtaining two
clear, sharp photographs, while panning, in a mere two seconds.
Although these facts suggested that the explanation given for the
pictures was at least highly improbable, Air Force experts refrained
from labeling them frauds. Professional photographers can undoubtedly
make various guesses as to how the pictures were made and the possible
identity of the V of bright spots, but proof is impossible. In the Air
Force files they remain in the category of Unknowns.
_Other Winged UFOs_
During the era of the saucers, winged creatures were responsible
for many UFO stories. But winged creatures do not stay put, and in
flying away they usually take with them the evidence that the alleged
spaceships were actually only birds or insects.
One such incident occurred at Downey, California, on May 29, 1951. Late
in the afternoon three technical writers for North American Aviation
were standing outdoors chatting and looking at the sky when suddenly
they noticed about thirty glowing, meteorlike objects moving in the
east, about 45 degrees above the horizon. They made no sound and left
no trail. Emitting an intense electric-blue light, the objects made
fantastic right-angled turns and swept across the sky in an undulating
vertical formation, apparently covering about 90 degrees of sky in
about 25 seconds. The diameters of the objects were estimated at 30
feet and the speed at 1700 miles an hour[VI-11].
Many persons concluded that the unknowns must be interplanetary in
origin because, as _Life_ magazine commented, no natural object
hurtling at such a speed could execute a right-angled turn, and no
known machine could fly so fast without making a sound or leaving a
trail. No one could quarrel with this statement, but it has no obvious
relation to the incident in question. Technical writers are not
necessarily trained observers, and these witnesses had no way to make
a reliable estimate of the height of the objects. Without an accurate
estimate of at least one quantity--true altitude, true size, or true
speed--the others are meaningless. The unknowns were probably birds,
but they could equally well have been butterflies, bits of paper, or
merely ashes blowing over the two-story building.
Winged creatures sometimes avoid the interplanetary label only by
staying in sight long enough to be examined. About sundown on May 19,
1955, switchboards at police stations in the Los Angeles area were
swamped by telephone calls reporting a fleet of silvery flying saucers,
changing formation with incredible speeds “as if playing tag in the
sky.” One witness, however, had the presence of mind to get out his
binoculars and look at the objects; they were birds with dark wing
tips. Thinking they might be geese, he called the State Division of
Fish and Game, which identified the “saucers” as a flock of _Pelicanus
erythrorhynchos_, an inland species of pelican that float on the
prevailing wind currents[VI-12].
Sometimes an observer identifies such objects correctly, but later
begins to doubt his own judgment. About 7:30 in the evening of August
26, 1956, a man driving along a highway in California noticed a flock
of about nine small birds flying northward, dark against the blue sky.
In a random group, they moved freely among themselves as birds do but
continued in a northern direction. The witness watched the birds as
carefully as possible, but the intermittent glimpses possible when
a man is driving a car did not allow him to make good estimates of
their size or height. Nevertheless, he guessed at their distance and
calculated that they covered an arc of 60 degrees in five seconds,
which would mean a speed of about 1000 miles an hour.
Instead of questioning the accuracy of his estimate, for some reason he
doubted his first identification. If the objects could fly 1000 miles
an hour, he reasoned, then they were not birds after all, and must be
flying saucers![VI-13]
_The Tremonton Movies_
One of the most famous controversies resulting from a flight of birds
centered on the Tremonton, Utah, films of UFOs.
On the morning of July 2, 1952, a Navy photographer and his family
were on their way to California, driving near the town of Tremonton,
Utah, not far from the Great Salt Lake. At about 11:10 A.M. the man’s
wife noticed something unusual in the sky. Stopping the car, the man
observed about a dozen shiny, disklike objects “milling around the sky
in a rough formation.” Getting out his movie camera, a Bell and Howell
16-mm. equipped with a 3-inch telephoto lens, he started photographing
the group. Just before it disappeared toward the west, one object left
the main group and headed east. The photographer obtained about forty
feet of film before the objects vanished. After developing the film, he
sent it to the Air Force for evaluation, together with his opinion that
the objects had been huge and had traveled at very high altitude at
supersonic speeds. This was only an impression, however, for as he told
investigators from ATIC: “There was no reference point in the sky and
it was impossible for me to make any estimate of speed, size, altitude,
or distance.”[VI-8] The pictures are of such poor quality and show
so little that even the most enthusiastic home-movie fan today would
hesitate to show them to his friends. Only a stimulated imagination
could suggest that the moving objects are anything but very badly
photographed birds.
The movies show nothing that can be recognized--merely bright blurs of
light moving at random. Their luminosity is not constant, and the spots
fade out and then become bright again. The frames include no clouds,
no trees, no house, no hill--no known reference point by which to
calculate the altitude, size, or distance of the moving lights. After
exhaustive study the photographic experts concluded that the negatives
had not been tampered with and that, unlike the Lubbock stills, the
pictures had been made exactly as described. But pictures of what? The
objects were not balloons and not planes. At the time, the experts
also rejected the theory that they might be birds because, in their
[mistaken] opinion, birds could not produce such bright reflections.
If the Tremonton movies contained no proof that the objects were birds,
still less did they contain proof that they were round machines from
outer space, and ATIC finally classified the sighting as “Unknown.”
Later, however, Captain Ruppelt noted the strong resemblance to sea
gulls he observed “riding a thermal” in the sky above San Francisco.
They were “so high that you couldn’t see them until they banked just
a certain way; then they appeared to be a bright white flash, much
larger than one would expect from sea gulls.” [VI-10, p. 290]
Air Force investigators later concluded that the famous Tremonton
movies show merely the large white gulls that soar near Utah’s Great
Salt Lake. The objects were photographed shortly before noon on a
hot summer’s day, against a deep-blue sky without any clouds to
obscure the high sun. The fading and brightening of the lights, their
individual motion within the group, and the one object that suddenly
left the group, all are consistent with the behavior of a flock of
birds, probably gulls, whose plumage is reflecting the sun. The glossy
feathers of these birds can flash as brilliantly as a satiny metal
surface as they circle and change position with respect to the sun. The
birds can be dazzling against the clear, dark-blue sky of the western
states. So brilliant is the flash that it wholly obscures the object
that is reflecting the light.
Like many other puzzling UFO reports, the objects in the Tremonton
movies were living lights--a case for the ornithologist rather than the
Air Force.
A bright light moving erratically as it crossed and recrossed the field
of view caused an experienced pilot and copilot to execute violent and
evasive maneuvers in a flight over the dark Pacific.[VI-14] The errant
UFO proved to be only a firefly inadvertently trapped between the panes
of the double windshield.
[VI-1] Rolfe, F. _Eastern Daily Press_, January 16, 1908.
[VI-2] Purdy, R. J. “The occasional luminosity of the White Owl (_Strix
flammea_),” _Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists
Society_, Vol. VIII (1904–1909), p. 547.
[VI-3] Gurney, J. H. _The Zoologist_, No. 802 (April 1908), p. 121.
[VI-4] Boston _Traveller_, Oct. 30, 1961.
[VI-5] London _Daily Telegraph_, November 8, 1958.
[VI-6] Maney, C. A., and Hall, R. _The Challenge of Unidentified Flying
Objects._ Washington, D.C., 1961.
[VI-7] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[VI-8] Air Force Files.
[VI-9] Menzel, D. H. Personal files.
[VI-10] Ruppelt, E. J. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects._
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., reprint, 1960.
[VI-11] _Life_ magazine, April 7, 1952.
[VI-12] Los Angeles _Times_, May 21, 1955.
[VI-13] Case 201, CRIFO _Orbit_, Vol. III (Oct. 5, 1956).
[VI-14] Major William T. Coleman. Personal communication.
_Chapter_ VII
PANIC
The summer of 1952, the period that Captain Ruppelt called “the big
flap,” offers a history of the UFO mania in capsule form. If the
newspapers were to be believed, the heavens were crowded with armadas
of spaceships both visible and invisible. There was even a monster
story to add spice to the tales.
Yet the panic was largely an artificial creation. All spring the
nation’s movie-goers had been flocking to see a well-made thriller,
_The Day the Earth Stood Still_, in which a mysterious glowing object
appears in the sky over Washington, D.C., and lands in the middle
of the city. The object proves to be a flying saucer from another
planet, whose inhabitants want only to help the human race. Looking
something like a huge poached egg, a hump in the center sloping down
to a circular rim, the pictured vehicle offered a dramatic example to
anyone in the mood to see a spaceship but not quite sure how it should
look. In fact, many of the saucers described in the months and years
following were obviously based on this model.
The summer’s hysteria was also nurtured by the fears of some Air
Force investigators who were convinced that UFOs were intelligently
controlled craft originating outside the earth[VII-1, p. 286].
Although these officials realized that whenever an unusually good
saucer story appeared in the papers the number of sightings increased
sharply in the days following, they apparently did not consider the
possibility that the increase resulted from the power of suggestion.
This apprehensive attitude, plus three publications in the spring of
1952, made the summer’s panic almost inevitable.
_Growth of a Panic_
On April 4 _Life_ magazine published an article whose title might well
have alarmed the most stolid: “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?”
Presenting ten “insoluble” cases, the article managed to suggest
without exactly saying so that interplanetary visitors were among us.
The very next day, April 5, the Air Force announced a new directive,
ordering the commanding officers of all Air Force installations to
make immediate, high-priority reports of all UFO sightings in their
areas[VII-1, p. 178]. Reasonably inferring from the _Life_ article
and from the new directive that Defense officials were concerned by the
threat of UFOs, newspapers gave space to all tales of flying saucers.
_Look_ magazine then jumped on the bandwagon and on June 24 published
an article, “Hunt for the Flying Saucers!” The public responded
enthusiastically. Hypnotized by the prestige of these magazines, whose
saucer articles seemed to have the support of the Air Force, thousands
of well-intentioned but poorly equipped observers joined in the hunt,
watched the skies, and began to cry “Tally-ho!” at every streak of
light.
Nature cooperated. As in every summer, she offered a rich display of
regular meteor showers. By mid-July Aquarids in large numbers are
streaking through the sky, to continue into mid-August, and by the
beginning of August the Perseids have arrived to join the summer’s
parade. The records of the American Meteor Society reflect this rise
in the number of meteors. In the nights from July 10 to 31, 1952, five
observers stationed in California, Oregon, Missouri, Iowa, and Long
Island, New York, counted a total of more than 2000 meteors in some
eighty-five hours of watching. The smallest number reported by a single
observer in any one hour was nine; the highest was fifty[VII-2].