by Hadley Mears August 8, 2018 (history.com)
• On August 25, 1951, a handful of scientists from Texas Technical College in Lubbock, Texas were hanging out and drinking tea in a fellow professors backyard. At 9:20 pm, they all saw a V-shaped formation of 15 to 30 blueish-green lights passing overhead. An hour later the lights appeared again in the sky, traveling from north to south.
• The sightings of these V-formation lights, or possibly a flying wing with lights on it, were seen by hundreds more over the next two weeks. A Lubbock rancher’s wife saw an ‘airplane without a body’ fly over her house, again with pairs of glowing bluish lights on the back edges of the wings.
• 350 miles away in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a Sandia Atomic Energy Commission employee and his wife as they sat outside, they saw a huge airplane flying silently over their house. At the edges of the planes wings were six to eight pairs of soft, glowing, bluish lights.
• In the meantime, the Texas Tech professors began their own informal investigation. In the weeks after their initial sighting, they all saw the lights a dozen more times. They noted that they always traveled from north to south. Their experiences lined up with those of the other Lubbock residents who claimed to have seen the lights.
• “The Lubbock Lights incident persists in the memory of many older citizens. Dr. Monte L. Monroe, archivist at Texas Tech University, told Texas Highways Magazine. “Mention the event, and everyone has an opinion. Some believe the bright, semicircular, so-called ‘string of beads’ crossed the sky at great speed, high in the stratosphere. Few agree with the streetlight-illuminated, migratory duck-bellies theory ventured at the time by skeptics or in the Air Force report.”
• On August 31st, a Texas Tech freshman named Carl Hart, Jr. was looking out for the infamous lights when he saw them come. He went out to his yard with a camera and took photos of them (image above) as they again passed overhead. He managed to take five photos of the V-shaped lights, or flying wing with lights. They are the only images caught of what hundreds were claiming they saw. Over 40 years later, in a rare interview, Carl Hart, Jr. said he still had no idea what he had photographed that August night. But like hundreds of others witnesses in and around Lubbock, he saw something he would never forget.
August 25, 1951 was a quiet summer night in Lubbock, Texas. That evening, a handful of scientists from Texas Technical College were hanging out in the backyard of geology professor Dr. W.I. Robinson, drinking tea and chatting about micrometeorites. It was quite the brain trust: chemical engineering professor Dr. A. G. Oberg, physics professor Dr. George and Dr. W. L. Ducker, head of the petroleum-engineering department.
Which made the story of what they witnessed that night all the more curious.
“If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn’t have picked a more technically qualified group of people,” wrote U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt later in his definitive 1956 casebook, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. In the early 1950s Ruppelt served as lead investigator for Project Blue Book, the official Air Force investigations into UFO sightings, after working on its precursor effort, Project Grudge.
Sightings of the blue-green lights kept growing
Around 9:20 p.m., the university colleagues saw something otherworldly in the expansive Texas sky: a V-shaped formation of 15 to 30 blueish-green lights passing overhead. Stunned, but still using their trained scientific reasoning, they figured the lights would reappear. And they did, about an hour later, in a more haphazard formation. The scientists were all in agreement: They had witnessed something fantastic—but what was it?
The professors weren’t the only credible witnesses to the mysterious blue-green lights that night. At dusk, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (about 350 miles away from Lubbock), an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission’s top-secret Sandia Corporation—a man with a high-level “Q” security clearance—had been sitting outside with his wife. According to Ruppelt: They were gazing at the night sky, commenting on how beautiful it was when both of them were startled at the sight of a huge airplane flying swiftly and silently over their home… On the aft edge of the wings, there were six to eight pairs of soft, glowing, bluish lights.
An hour or so after, according to a retired rancher from Lubbock, his wife had seen something terrifying in the night sky. Ruppelt described it this way: Just after dark, his wife had gone outdoors to take some sheets off the clothesline. He was inside the house reading the paper. Suddenly his wife had rushed into the house…“as white as the sheets she was carrying.” The reason his wife was so upset was that she had seen a large object glide swiftly and silently over the house. She said it looked like “an airplane without a body.” On the back edge of the wing were pairs of glowing bluish lights.
By the time Ruppelt flew into Lubbock to investigate the sightings in late September, hundreds of residents had seen the lights over a period of two weeks.
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