This was the professors’ story.  It was early in the morning when we returned to Reese AFB.  I sat up a few more hours unsuccessfully trying to figure out what they had seen.

The next day I again met the intelligence officer and we went to talk to Carl Hart, Jr., the amateur photographer who had taken the pictures of the lights.  Hart was a freshman at Texas Tech.  His story was that on the night of August 31 he was lying in his bed in an upstairs room of the Hart home.  He, like everyone else in Lubbock, had heard about the lights but he had never seen them.  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 back yard.  Before long his vigil was rewarded when the lights made a second pass.  He got two pictures.  A third formation went over a few minutes later and he got three more pictures.  The next morning bright and early Hart said he took the roll of unexposed film to a friend who ran a photo-finishing shop.  He explained that he did all of his film processing in this friend’s lab.  He told the friend about the pictures and they quickly developed them.

I stopped Hart at this point and asked why he didn’t get more excited about what could be the biggest news photos of the century.  He said that the lights had appeared to be so dim that he was sure he didn’t have anything on the negatives; had he thought that he did have some good pictures he would have awakened his friend to develop the negatives right away.

When he developed the negatives and saw that they showed an image, his friend suggested that he call the newspaper.  At first the paper wasn’t interested but then they decided to run the photos.  I later found out that they had done some checking of their own.

We went with Hart into his back yard to re-enact what had taken place.  He described the lights as being the same dull, glowing bluish-green color as those seen by the professors.  The formation was different, however.  The lights Hart saw were always flying in a perfect V. He traced the path from where they appeared over some trees in the north, through an open patch of sky over the back yard, to a point where they disappeared over the house.  From the flight path he pointed out, the lights had crossed about 120 degrees of open sky in four seconds.  This 30-degree-per-second angular velocity corresponded to the professors’ measured angular velocity.

We made arrangements to borrow Hart’s negatives, thanked him for his information, and left.