The Lubbock Lights

Saturday, 25 August 1951. Around 9 p.m. in Lubbock, Texas. Four men from Texas Technological College sat in the backyard of geology professor Dr. W. I. Robinson, discussing micro meteorites. With him were Dr. A. G. Oberg, Prof. W. L. Ducker and Dr. George of physics. Then, as Ruppelt told it, "a formation of lights streaked across the sky directly over their heads."

"The lights were a weird bluish green color and they were in a semicircular formation." The men estimated fifteen to thirty separate lights. They moved from north to south. They made no sound. In seconds they were gone.

About an hour later the lights went over again. This time the professors were a little better prepared. Now the lights "were not in any orderly formation, they were just in a group." Over the next few weeks the scientists made twelve more observations. The lights "usually suddenly appeared 45 degrees above the northern horizon, and abruptly went out 45 degrees above the southern horizon."

30 August 1951. Carl Hart Jr., a Texas Tech freshman, was sleeping with his window open in the heat. He saw three formations. From his parents' backyard he took five frames with a Kodak 35, set at f 3.5 and one tenth of a second. The lights were "always flying in a perfect V." Years later he would insist: "the only thing I saw was lights."

Jay Harris, editor of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, paid Hart $10 and said he would "run him (Hart) out of town" if the photos were fake. Chief photographer William Hams tried to reproduce them by shooting birds under street lights. He could not. The pictures went out on the wires, and on 7 April 1952 into Life.

Lt. Edward J. Ruppelt of Project Grudge, soon to become Project Blue Book, arrived in late September with Capt. Parker. "If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn't have picked a more technically qualified group of people," he said. The professors had laid out a baseline, with two teams carrying elevation-measuring devices. "Unfortunately neither team ever saw the lights."

The Air Technical Intelligence Center studied Hart's negatives. Test Report WCEFP-2-4, dated 29 November 1951, found "roughly 20 spots" in a V, with "relative movement within the formation of spots, so that they are not lights on a fixed object." Ruppelt's verdict was simple. "The photos were never proven to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine."

Lubbock had just installed new mercury vapour street lights. Ruppelt's first theory was plovers lit from below. Joe Bryant and his wife identified circling lights as plovers "by sight and sound." But a game warden said plovers travel in pairs or threes, never in flocks of 15 to 30. Biology head J. C. Cross said, "It definitely wasn't caused by birds."

Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel blamed atmospheric refraction. He later accused Hart of faking the photos, without evidence. Hart never recanted. The professors wrote to Life that they had seen arcs, not a V. In 1956 Ruppelt said their lights had been "positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon." He had promised the scientist anonymity. He died in 1960 without revealing it.

Officially, the sightings remained "unknowns." Carl Hart Jr. died in Lubbock on 24 September 2020, aged 87. He said he "still didn't know" what they were. The lights live on in Life, in Time, and in a 2019 episode of History's Project Blue Book.