The Levelland UFO Case

Early November 1957. Sputnik 1 had been in orbit for about four weeks. Levelland was a town of about 10,000 people in Hockley County, on the South Plains west of Lubbock. On the night of Saturday, November 2, its highways and farm roads filled with strange lights.

About 10:50 p.m. Pedro Saucedo and Joe Salaz were driving a truck on Route 116, about 4 miles west of town. A blue flash. The engine died and the headlights went out. A rocket-shaped object, about 200 feet long, rose and came toward them. "I jumped out of the truck and hit the dirt because I was afraid," Saucedo said. "The thing passed directly over my big truck with a great sound and rush of wind. It sounded like thunder and my truck rocked from the flash." When it left, the truck worked again. Patrolman A. J. Fowler, on the night desk, reportedly took the call for a joke.

About an hour later, Jim Wheeler found a brilliantly lit, egg-shaped object, about 200 feet long, sitting on the road 4 miles east of town. His engine and headlights failed. At 12:05 a.m. it was Newell Wright, a freshman at Texas Technological College. His motor started "cutting out like it was out of gas." His headlights dimmed and went out. He saw an oval with a flat bottom and a bluish-green glow. It rose "almost straight up" and vanished "in a split instant."

Near Whitharral, farmer Frank Williams saw a pulsating glow on a dirt road. His lights went out and his motor stopped. At 1:15 a.m. a truck driver from Waco saw an egg-shaped object glowing on and off "like a neon sign." It "shot straight up with a roar."

About 1:30 a.m. Sheriff Weir Clem and Deputy Pat McCulloch were on Oklahoma Flat Road. An oval light appeared to the south. "It lit up the whole pavement in front of us for about two seconds," Clem said. It "looked like a brilliant red sunset."

The Assistant Secretary of Defense wanted an immediate answer for the press. Blue Book chief Captain George T. Gregory called it "a most difficult requirement in view of the limited data." On November 5, Staff Sergeant Norman P. Barth reached the Hockley County Sheriff's Office. He spent about 7 hours in Levelland and interviewed Clem, Saucedo, Wheeler and Wright. No vehicles were inspected.

The verdict was "weather phenomena of an electrical nature, generally classified as 'Ball Lightning' or 'St. Elmo's Fire.'" The stalled cars were blamed on "wet electrical circuits."

Harvard astronomer Donald H. Menzel wrote that "conditions were ideal for the formation of ball lightning." J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force's own consultant, later changed his mind. "I am not proud today that I hastily concurred in [the Air Force's] evaluation as 'ball lightning'," he wrote in 1972. Observers, he noted, reported overcast and mist but no lightning. In 1968 physicist James E. McDonald told a House symposium: "Ten vehicles were stopped within a short area, all independently in a 2-hour period." Ball lightning is rarely more than a foot or two across. Witnesses described objects 100 to 200 feet long.

Levelland was part of a November 1957 wave, with reports from White Sands and Orogrande, New Mexico. In 2002 Clem's widow Oleta told KDFW: "It come down and then it went back up as fast as it come down." No proposed mechanism for the stalled engines has ever been verified.