Lubbock Lights

Lubbock Lights

Type	Case (sighting series with photographs)
Date	25 August – September 1951
Place	Lubbock, Texas, and surrounding towns; linked reports from Albuquerque and Matador
Main witnesses	Texas Tech professors W. I. Robinson, A. G. Oberg, W. L. Ducker and Dr. George; photographer Carl Hart Jr.
Photographs	Five taken by Carl Hart Jr., 30/31 August 1951
Investigator	Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, Project Grudge/Blue Book
Official status	All sightings except a radar report listed as "unknowns"
Also known as	Lubbock lights

The Lubbock Lights were formations of soft, glowing, bluish-green lights seen over Lubbock, Texas, in August and September 1951, first reported by a group of professors from Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University) and photographed by a student, Carl Hart Jr. The case received national publicity and was investigated in person by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, soon to head Project Blue Book, who linked it with sightings of a giant "flying wing" and a radar report. Ruppelt wrote that "officially all of the sightings, except the UFO that was picked up on radar, are unknowns".^[1][2]

Ruppelt first suspected migrating plovers reflecting the city's new street lights, and later said that a scientist had privately identified the professors' lights as a "very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon", which he could not disclose. Hart's photographs were "never proven to be a hoax, but neither were they proven to be genuine".^[1][2]

The professors' sightings

On the evening of 25 August 1951 four Texas Tech professors — 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; and Dr. George, a professor of physics — were sitting in Robinson's back yard discussing micrometeorites and drinking tea, as they jokingly stressed. At about 9:20 p.m. a formation of lights streaked across the sky directly overhead, so quickly that none of them got a good look. The lights were a weird bluish-green, in a semicircular formation, and numbered fifteen to thirty, moving north to south. About an hour later they passed again, this time in a loose group rather than a formation. Robinson reported the sighting to the local newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.^[1][2]

The lights returned the next night, and over the following weeks the professors made twelve more observations, adding two more people to their team. They timed the lights crossing 90 degrees of sky in three seconds; the lights usually appeared suddenly 45 degrees above the northern horizon and went out 45 degrees above the southern horizon, and two or three flights were often seen in one night. They tried to measure the lights' height by setting up two radio-linked teams with elevation-measuring instruments at the ends of a baseline, but the teams never saw them — although the wives of some of the watchers said they had seen them from home. Dr. George, who had studied the night sky while a professor at the University of Alaska, said he had never seen anything like them.^[2]

According to the UFO historian Jerome Clark, three women in Lubbock and Carl Hemminger, a professor of German at Texas Tech, also reported "peculiar flashing lights" on the first night. On 5 September the professors, joined by the mathematics professor E. Richard Heineman and another colleague, saw the lights again from Robinson's front yard. One of them, Grayson Mead, said they looked "about the size of a dinner plate", greenish-blue and slightly fluorescent, about a dozen to fifteen of them and "absolutely circular", and that they gave everyone "an extremely eerie feeling". Clark wrote that one formation flew above a thin cloud at about 2,000 feet, which let the professors calculate a speed of over 600 mph. Hundreds of other people in and around Lubbock reported similar lights over the next two weeks, though few said they had seen them before reading the professors' story.^[1][2][3]

The Hart photographs

On the night of 30 or 31 August 1951 — sources differ — Carl Hart Jr., a Texas Tech freshman, was lying in bed by an open upstairs window when he saw a V-shaped formation of 18 to 20 white lights cross the sky. Expecting them to return, he took his loaded 35 mm Kodak camera, set it at f/3.5 and one-tenth of a second, and went into his parents' back yard. Two more formations passed, and he took five photographs. A friend who ran a photo-finishing shop developed the film the next morning and suggested he call the newspaper. The Avalanche-Journal's editor, Jay Harris, agreed to buy the photos for $10, but warned Hart he would "run him out of town" if they were fake. The pictures were reprinted across the United States and in Life magazine.^[1][2][4]

Hart described the lights as the same dull bluish-green as the professors', but always in a perfect V. The professors, however, said the photographs did not show what they had seen — their lights were soft and glowing and, apart from the first flight, in a disorderly group or a "U" shape — and were convinced the pictures were "of home manufacture".^[1][2]

Ruppelt's investigation

Ruppelt learned of the case in late September 1951, when three reports reached the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at once. The first, from Kirtland Air Force Base, described how on 25 August, about twenty minutes before the professors' first sighting, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission's Sandia Corporation, who held a "Q" security clearance, and his wife had seen a huge, silent "flying wing", one and a half times the size of a B-36, pass low over their home on the outskirts of Albuquerque, with dark bands across it and six to eight pairs of soft, glowing bluish lights along its trailing edge. The second was the Lubbock report, with Hart's photos showing a V of lights much like those on the wing. The third, from an Air Defense Command radar station in Washington State, reported that early on 26 August two radars had tracked a target moving at 900 mph at 13,000 feet on a northwesterly heading for six minutes; an F-86 was scrambled too late. Ruppelt calculated that something flying from Lubbock to the radar site would have had to travel at about 780 mph.^[2]

Shown Hart's photos without explanation, the Albuquerque couple said, "this is what they saw", sketching a wing around the lights. Ruppelt then flew to Lubbock, where with the intelligence officer from Reese Air Force Base he met the professors, re-enacted Hart's photographs in his back yard — the lights had crossed about 120 degrees of sky in four seconds, the same angular speed the professors measured — and interviewed other witnesses in Lubbock and nearby towns, including airport tower operators. One woman described a flying Venetian blind and another a flying double boiler. Air Force investigators also interviewed a mother and daughter from Matador, 70 miles northeast of Lubbock, who said that on 31 August they saw a "pear-shaped", aluminium-coloured object the size of a B-29 fuselage, with a "porthole", hovering about 120 feet above the road before spiralling up out of sight; it was moving into the wind.^[2]

Plovers and street lights

In the town of Lamesa an elderly man told Ruppelt that he and his wife had seen the lights and identified them when one of them called out — it was a plover, a water bird about the size of a quail. A local farmer, T. E. Snider, had seen birds over a drive-in theatre on 31 August with their undersides lit up, and Joe Bryant and his wife saw groups of lights on 25 August, the third of which circled their house and was identified by sight and sound as plovers. Lubbock had installed new mercury-vapour street lights in 1951, and Ruppelt noticed that the professors' homes were near one of the lit boulevards, and that the lights were seen by the wives at home but not by the teams away from it — consistent with low-flying birds. J. Allen Hynek later learned that one of the professors had come to believe the lights were plovers.^[1][2]

Others disagreed. The federal game warden said plovers usually travelled in twos or threes, not flocks of fifteen to thirty, though there were unusually many in the area that autumn. J. C. Cross, head of Texas Tech's biology department, also said the lights could not have been birds. Mead said they were too large and fast for any bird he knew as a hunter, and would have had to be very low to vanish so quickly. William Hams, chief photographer of the Avalanche-Journal, photographed birds flying over the street lights at night and could not reproduce Hart's pictures. People living miles from the lit boulevards had also reported the lights.^[1][2]

Analysis of the photographs

The Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory at Wright Field examined four of Hart's original five negatives, which were badly scratched from handling. It found that they showed an inverted V of near-pinpoint lights, blurred by camera motion, whose positions within the formation shifted in a definite pattern from frame to frame. No stars were visible in the background, so the lights must have been far brighter than the stars, at least to the film. Trying to duplicate Hart's feat with an identical camera and a moving light, Ruppelt's team could get only two badly blurred shots in four seconds, which led many to doubt the photos; but an Aeromedical Laboratory physiologist said an excited photographer could easily manage three, and professional photographers, including one from Life, said a photographer skilled at panning — Hart had photographed sports for the newspaper — would get much sharper images. The laboratory said that a light source far toward the red or infrared end of the spectrum could look dim to the eye but bright on film, adding that nothing then flying would do so. Ruppelt's official conclusion was that the photos "were never proven to be a hoax, but neither were they proven to be genuine".^[1][2]

Speed and silence

Without an altitude, the professors' measurements could not give a speed. Ruppelt calculated that at 10,000 feet the lights would have been travelling about 3,600 mph, in a formation about 1,750 feet wide, with each light perhaps 100 feet across. Puzzled by their silence, he asked aeronautical laboratories whether a fast-moving object could be inaudible; they had no data, but thought a jet without engine noise, or a perfectly streamlined shell, might not be heard from 5,000–10,000 feet.^[2]

The flying wing

On his flight home Ruppelt sat next to a retired Lubbock rancher, who told him in confidence that on the night of the professors' first sighting, about ten minutes earlier, his wife had rushed in from the clothesline, "as white as the sheets she was carrying", having seen a large object glide silently over the house, like "an airplane without a body", with pairs of glowing bluish lights on its trailing edge — a description matching the Albuquerque report, which neither could have known. Ruppelt also learned that others in and around Lubbock, including Mrs. Ducker, had reported a "huge, soundless flying wing" in August 1951. He knew the Air Force had a flying-wing jet bomber and thought some sightings might have been that aircraft, but could not explain why it made no sound.^[1][2]

ATIC's electronics specialists attributed the Washington radar target to weather, in a borderline case, predicting that it would have looked different on the two radars. The radar captain told Ruppelt it had looked the same on both, which was why he had reported it. The flying-wing reports and the Matador sighting remained unexplained.^[2]

Conclusions and theories

The Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel argued in Look, Time and his book Flying Saucers that the professors had seen city lights refracted by the atmosphere. Ruppelt noted that a group of government-connected scientists — rocket experts, nuclear physicists and intelligence specialists — who studied Blue Book's files believed the Lubbock series showed a swept-wing spacecraft controlled by small jets around its edge, whose changing attitudes explained the different light patterns. In about 70% of later reports of similar lights, he said, they proved to be birds reflecting city lights.^[2]

Ruppelt himself had thought the professors saw birds lit by the mercury-vapour lamps, but later wrote that he had been wrong: "They weren't birds, they weren't refracted light, but they weren't spaceships." He said the lights had been positively identified as "a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon" by a scientist who spent several months with full instrumentation testing theory after theory, but that he had promised the man anonymity and could not reveal the answer. With the professors' sightings "solved", he wrote, the other parts of the case became "only good UFO reports".^[1][2]

In popular culture

In April 1952 Life published an article on UFOs featuring the Lubbock Lights, and Ruppelt devoted a chapter of his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects to the case. The British release of the 1953 film Invaders from Mars included a scene in which characters discuss the lights as evidence of alien visitors. In November 1999 the Dallas TV station KDFW aired an interview with Carl Hart Jr. about the photographs. The lights featured in the 2002 Sci Fi Channel miniseries Taken; a 2005 documentary, Lubbock Lights, about the city's music scene discussed theories about them; the band Thrift Store Cowboys recorded a song called "Lubbock Lights" in 2006; and the third episode of the History Channel's Project Blue Book (2019) is based on the case.^[1]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Lubbock Lights”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.