United States.Lubbock Lights · formations of lights seen and photographed

On the night of August 25, 1951, four Texas Technological College professors (a geologist, a chemist, a physicist and a petroleum engineer) were gathered around 9:20 p.m. in the yard of a house in Lubbock, Texas, chatting, when they saw a formation of between 20 and 30 blue-green lights arranged in a semicircle pass overhead in a few seconds. Startled, the group agreed to meet again to try to record the phenomenon if it recurred: they noted times, counted the lights and tried to estimate altitude and speed with the discipline of their profession. According to Ruppelt, they saw it on fourteen occasions: they measured that the lights crossed 90 degrees of sky in three seconds, about 30 degrees per second, appeared suddenly 45 degrees above the northern horizon and went out 45 degrees above the southern one, always north to south. The phenomenon was also observed by numerous city residents.

On August 30, 1951 according to the Blue Book file (August 31 according to Ruppelt), Carl Hart Jr., a Texas Tech freshman, was lying in bed looking out his bedroom window when he saw a group of lights in a "V" formation, of the same dull bluish-green color the professors had described, as he told Ruppelt; he grabbed his camera, went out to the yard, and working quickly as the formation crossed again, got five exposures. The photographs (luminous points arranged in one or two arcs against a black sky, with no star visible, which according to Ruppelt proves the lights were much brighter than the stars or affected the film more; the Blue Book file keeps four of them) were published months later in the mass-circulation LIFE magazine. The head of Project Blue Book, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, traveled to Lubbock, interviewed the professors, Hart and other witnesses, and examined the photos without finding evidence of a hoax; the case marked him enough that he devoted a chapter to Lubbock in his memoir on the investigation.

Ruppelt's only solid lead was birds: a couple from Lamesa had identified identical lights as plovers by their call, a farmer saw birds with lit-up bellies over a drive-in theater, and the city had installed mercury-vapor street lighting. But the Lubbock game warden told him plovers usually travel in no more than pairs, or three at the most; moreover, the professors did not see the lights when they went out looking away from home, while their wives saw them from there, and people living miles from the mercury-vapor-lit boulevards also said they had seen them. In his 1956 book Ruppelt wrote that he had thought of birds but was wrong: "they weren't birds, they weren't refracted light, but they weren't spaceships"; they were, he wrote, a commonplace natural phenomenon that an anonymous scientist had identified. He added that officially all the sightings except the radar detection were "unknowns".

The witnesses rejected the idea forcefully: they insisted the lights were too bright, too synchronized and too uniform in their movement to be birds; professor Grayson Mead said they were too large for any bird, and Texas Tech biology head J. C. Cross also ruled out birds. Donald Menzel, of Harvard, attributed them to refracted city lights. In 1959, one of the professors told J. Allen Hynek he had studied the case thoroughly and that they were birds, and a later Air Force report concluded that the probable cause was migrating birds, more probably ducks than plovers, reflecting the street lights. The bird hypothesis was never unanimously accepted, and Hart's five photos were never conclusively explained: the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal photographer could not reproduce them by photographing birds over the street lamps.

In August and September 1951, the Lubbock Lights brought together scientifically trained witnesses, observations repeated over several weeks and five photographs that became part of the phenomenon's imagery. That the first observers were four university professors, who counted the lights and measured their speed (presumably careful observers, with a professional incentive not to be publicly wrong), gave the case unusual credibility for the time and made it national news.

The case remained an ambivalent classic. The Air Force adopted the explanation of birds reflecting the street lights, and one of the professors, after studying what he himself had seen, reached the same conclusion; but the head of Blue Book himself had rejected it in writing, and the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal photographer could not reproduce Hart's photos by photographing birds over the street lamps.