Sign up for

the Inside
History
newsletter

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 UPDATED: JAN 10, 2020 · ORIGINAL: AUG 8, 2018

The Unsolved Mystery of the

Lubbock Lights UFO Sightings
HADLEY MEARES

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Hundreds of people, including several university

scientists, witnessed the ying blue-green lights in
August 1951. One person even took photos.

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 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.

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 READ MORE: Interactive Map: UFO Sightings Taken Seriously by
the U.S. Government

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?

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 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
SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 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
Edward Ruppelt oversaw Project
Blue Book for the U.S. Air Force, a as the sheets she was carrying.”
program that monitored and The reason his wife was so
investigated UFO reports.
Everett Collection
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.

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 READ MORE: The 5 Most Credible Modern UFO Sightings

Locals investigate, and even snap some photos

But not everyone had waited for the government to start looking
into the matter. After alerting local papers like the Lubbock
Avalanche-Journal, the Texas Tech professors started their own
informal investigation. In the weeks after their initial August
25sighting, they and their friends observed the lights 12 more
times. They measured the lights’ angles, roughly calculated their
speed and noted that they always traveled from north to south.
Armed with walkie-talkies, the scientist-sleuths and their friends
formed two teams and attempted to measure the UFO’s altitude,
with little success.

As the days went on, more and more Lubbock residents claimed to
have seen the lights. And
SHOWS THISwhen theHISTORY
DAY IN professorsSCHEDULE
cross-checked theseSTORIES
TOPICS

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 reports against what they themselves had seen and recorded,
many of the facts lined up, Ruppelt wrote. Of course, few if any had
recorded the phenomena with the same level of detail as the
professors.

But while many observers offered incomplete or poorly expressed

recollections, there’s little doubt that whatever people were seeing
was something real. UFO sightings are usually one-off events, but
these blue-green lights were observed multiple times, by hundreds
of people.

READ MORE: Why Mysterious Green Fireballs over New Mexico

Worried the U.S. Government in 1948.

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 The Lubbock Lights, photographed by 19-year old Carl Hart, Jr. on August
30, 1951 in Lubbock, Texas.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Plus, for many, there was physical proof: black-and-white photos

taken by a Texas Tech freshman named Carl Hart, Jr. On August 31
—the same night an Air Force wife and her daughter claimed to
have seen a UFO while driving northwest from Matador, Texas, to
Lubbock—Hart was keeping vigil in his bedroom, looking out for
the infamous lights. According to Ruppelt:

It was a warm night and his bed was pushed over next to an open
window. He was looking out at the clear night sky, and had been in
bed about a half hour, when he saw a formation of the lights
appear in the north… cross an open patch of sky, and disappear
over his house. Knowing that the lights might reappear as they had
done in the past, he grabbed his loaded Kodak 35, set the lens and
shutter at f 3.5 and one-tenth of a second, and went out into the
middle of the backyard. Before long, his vigil was rewarded when
the lights made a second pass. He got two pictures. A third
SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 formation went over a few minutes later, and he got three more
pictures.

These hotly debated images, which show a cluster of dim lights in a

V-formation moving through the night sky, are the only visual
representation of what hundreds were now claiming they saw.

READ MORE: Mysterious UFOs Seen by WWII Airmen Still

Unexplained.

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 Captain Edward Ruppelt, standing between the two seated men, with
other officers of the U.S. Air Force at a 1952 news conference where they
announced the installment of more than 200 cameras in attempts to
obtain data on the unidentified flying objects reported from various parts
of the nation.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Was it birds? Or planes? The government's investigator goes coy

As Ruppelt began his formal investigation, he found that the lights

had affected all who saw them, including a hardened old man from
Lamesa, who had witnessed them with his wife. “He broke off his
story of the lights and launched into his background as a native
Texan, with range wars, Indians and stagecoaches under his belt,”
Ruppelt recalled of their interview session. “What he was trying to
point out was that despite the range wars, Indians and
stagecoaches, he had been scared. His wife had been scared, too.”

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 The old Lamesa man had suggested that the lights were actually
plover birds, a theory to which Ruppelt would lend some credence.
But just like many people Ruppelt interviewed, the old man
admitted he and his wife had been looking for the lights after
reading about them in the paper. This was a common thread tying
together many of the witnesses. “One point of interest was that
very few claimed to have seen the lights before reading the
professors’ story in the paper,” Ruppelt wrote. “But this could get
back to the old question, ‘Do people look up if they have no reason
to do so?’”

READ MORE: Meet J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who first

classified UFO 'close encounters.'

So, what exactly did all these people witness? In The Report on
Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt—by all accounts an honorable
and fair man who oversaw what many describe as the “golden age”
of the government’s official UFO investigations—offers a strangely
evasive explanation:

I thought that the professors’ lights might have been some kind of
birds reflecting the light
SHOWS from
THIS DAYmercury-vapor street lights,TOPICS
IN HISTORY SCHEDULE but I wasSTORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 wrong. They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they
weren’t spaceships. The lights that the professors saw…have been
positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable
natural phenomenon…I can’t divulge exactly the way the answer
was found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set
up complete instrumentation to track down the lights. Telling the
story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I
promised the man complete anonymity... With the most important
phase of the Lubbock Lights “solved”—the sightings by the
professors—the other phases become only good UFO reports.

And so, the mystery of the Lubbock Lights remains unsolved.

“The Lubbock Lights incident persists in the memory of many older

citizens, and to this day captivates researchers from across the
country,” Dr. Monte L. Monroe, Southwest collection 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.”
SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 According to Monroe, the professors and other witnesses—tired of
explaining themselves and what they saw—almost totally ceased
giving interviews by the 1970s. In a rare informal interview, more
than 40 years after the sightings, Carl Hart, Jr. reportedly told
author and UFO researcher Kevin D. Randle he still had no
idea what he had photographed that pleasant August night many
moons ago. But like hundreds of others witnesses in and around
Lubbock that strange Texas summer, he saw something he would
never forget.

WATCH: Full episodes of Project Blue Book online now.

BY HADLEY MEARES

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right,
click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is
complete and accurate.

SIGN UP FOR MORE HISTORY!

Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you.

SIGN UP

RELATED CONTENT

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 History’s Most Infamous UFO Sightings America’s First UFO Sighting

The UFO Sightings That Launched 'Men in

The 5 Most Credible Modern UFO Sightings Black' Mythology

SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 How the U.S. Air Force Investigated UFOs Mysterious UFOs Seen by WWII Airman Still
During the Cold War Unexplained

Ad Choices · Advertise · Closed Captioning · Copyright Policy · Corporate Information · Employment Opportunities
· FAQ/Contact Us · Privacy Notice · Terms of Use · TV Parental Guidelines · RSS Feeds · Accessibility Support

© 2021 A&E Television Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD