UFOs in the daily Press:

Was Strange Light Explanation For The Birds?

By Mike Conley

During a two-week period in August and September 1951, hundreds of people in Lubbock, Texas watched the night skies for strange lights that no one could explain. The weird phenomenon would become known everywhere as the Lubbock Lights.

The whole thing started at around 9 p.m. on Aug. 25 when a man and his wife were startled by what looked like a huge, wing-shaped flying object passing over the outskirts of Albuquerque, N.M. The object, flying at an altitude of 1,000 feet, looked like it had blue lights on its trailing edge, according to the book "The UFO Phenomenon" by Time-Life.

About 20 minutes later, three college professors in Lubbock, Texas were relaxing on the front porch of a house when they saw a semicircular formation of lights fly overhead at a high speed. Because the lights flew by so quickly, none of the professors could get a good look at them.

The three men were Dr. W.I. Robinson, professor of geology at Texas Technological College, Dr. A.G. Oberg, professor of chemical engineering, and Dr. W.L. Ducker, head of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech. Obviously, all of them were accomplished scholars and scientists who could not be easily fooled, according to a Web site.

A few moments later, another similar formation flashed across the clear night sky. This time the professors were able to get a better look at the lights. They described them as softly glowing bluish objects flying in a loose formation.

The next day, a nearby Air Defense Command radar station reported that its equipment detected an unidentified object at 13,000 feet traveling at 900 miles per hour. Dozens of people in and around Lubbock came forward to report that they too had seen the lights. One woman drew a picture of a wing-shaped craft that looked just like the one seen in Albuquerque.

Five days later, the lights came back. Carl Hart Jr., an 18-year-old freshman at Texas Tech, managed to snap five photographs with his 35 mm Kodak camera. The pictures showed a V formation of lights in the night sky. Some of them showed a large glowing object off to the right that looked like a mother ship hovering near the others. The photos would appear in newspapers across the nation and even Life magazine, according to a Web site.

The three Texas Tech professors examined Hart?s photographs but could find no explanation for them. In late September, a report on the Lubbock Lights reached the Air Force, which examined the pictures in great detail and found no evidence that they had been faked. But the Air Force didn't say that they were photos of alien spacecraft either.

Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, the Air Force officer who later became the first director of Project Blue Book, traveled to Lubbock to investigate the case. Project Blue Book was the Air Force?s official, in-depth investigation into the UFO phenomenon.

Ruppelt interviewed the professors, Hart and others who claimed to have witnessed the lights. He concluded that what the professors saw was a type of bird called a plover. The city of Lubbock had installed new street lights in 1951 and Ruppelt believed that the plovers, flying over the city in their annual migration, were reflecting the new lights off their bodies. Some witnesses said they heard the sound that these birds make when the strange lights appeared in the night sky.

But not everyone agreed with this explanation. A photographer for the local newspaper took several nighttime pictures of birds flying over the city?s street lights and found that he could not duplicate Hart?s photos. A game warden stated that the sightings could not have been caused by plovers, due to their slow speed and tendency to fly in small groups.

Fifty-six years later, the Lubbock Lights are still an unsolved mystery. Some believe that they were visitors from outer space while others insist that they were a natural phenomenon.