CHAPTER EIGHT

The Lubbock Lights, Unabridged

When four college professors, a geologist, a chemist, a physicist, and a petroleum engineer, report seeing the same UFO’s on fourteen different occasions, the event can be classified as, at least, unusual.  Add the facts that hundreds of other people saw these UFO’s and that they were photographed, and the story gets even better.  Add a few more facts—­that these UFO’s were picked up on radar and that a few people got a close look at one of them, and the story begins to convince even the most ardent skeptics.

This was the situation the day the reports of the Lubbock Lights arrived at ATIC.  Actually the Lubbock Lights, as Project Blue Book calls them, involved many widespread reports.  Some of these incidents are known to the public, but the ones that added the emphasis and intrigue to the case and caused hundreds of hours of time to be spent analyzing the reports have not been told before.  We collected all of these reports under the one title because there appeared to be a tie-in between them.

The first word of the sightings reached ATIC late in September 1951, when the mail girl dropped letters into my “in” basket.  One of the letters was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, one was from a small town in Washington State, where I knew an Air Defense Command radar station was located, and the other from Reese AFB at Lubbock, Texas.

I opened the Albuquerque letter first.  It was a report from 34th Air Defense at Kirtland AFB.  The report said that on the evening of August 25, 1951, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission’s supersecret Sandia Corporation and his wife had seen a UFO.  About dusk they were sitting in the back yard of their home on the outskirts of Albuquerque.  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.  The airplane had been in sight only a few seconds but they had gotten a good look at it because it was so low.  They estimated 800 to 1,000 feet.  It was the shape of a “flying wing” and one and a half times the size of a B-36.  The wing was sharply swept back, almost like a V. Both the husband and wife had seen B-36’s over their home many times.  They couldn’t see the color of the UFO but they did notice that there were dark bands running across the wing from front to back.  On the aft edge of the wings there were six to eight pairs of soft, glowing, bluish lights.  The aircraft had passed over their house from north to south.