(Three years later the Canadian Government announced that this was exactly the way that they had planned to control the flying saucer that they were trying to build.  They had to give up their plans for the development of the saucer-like craft, but now the project has been taken over by the U.S.  Air Force.)

This is the complete story of the Lubbock Lights as it is carried in the Air Force files, one of the most interesting and most controversial collection of UFO sightings ever to be reported to Project Blue Book.  Officially all of the sightings, except the UFO that was picked up on radar, are unknowns.

Personally I thought that the professors’ lights might have been some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street lights, but I was wrong.  They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they weren’t spaceships.  The lights that the professors saw—­the backbone of the Lubbock Light series—­have been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon.

It is very unfortunate that 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 and how he spent several months testing theory after theory until he finally hit upon the answer.  Telling the story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete anonymity.  But he fully convinced me that he had the answer, and after having heard hundreds of explanations of UFO’s, I don’t convince easily.

With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights “solved”—­the sightings by the professors—­the other phases become only good UFO reports.

CHAPTER NINE

The New Project Grudge

While I was in Lubbock, Lieutenant Henry Metscher, who was helping me on Project Grudge, had been sorting out the many bits and pieces of information that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten had brought back from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and he had the answers.

The UFO that the student radar operator had assumed to be traveling at a terrific speed because he couldn’t lock on to it turned out to be a 400-mile-an-hour conventional airplane.  He’d just gotten fouled up on his procedures for putting the radar set on automatic tracking.  The sighting by the two officers in the T-33 jet fell apart when Metscher showed how they’d seen a balloon.

The second radar sighting of the series also turned out to be a balloon.  The frantic phone call from headquarters requesting a reading on the object’s altitude was to settle a bet.  Some officers in headquarters had seen the balloon launched and were betting on how high it was.

The second day’s radar sightings were caused by another balloon and weather—­both enhanced by the firm conviction that there were some mighty queer goings on over Jersey.