On the front page of the paper was an account of a large meteor that had flashed across New Mexico, west Texas, and Oklahoma the night before.  According to the newspaper account, it was very spectacular and had startled a good many people in Lubbock.  I was interested in the story because I had seen this meteor.  It was a spectacular sight and I could easily understand how such things could be called UFO’s.  My seat partner must have noticed that I was reading the story of the meteor because he commented that a friend of his, the man who had brought him to the airport, had seen it.  We talked about the meteor.  This led to a discussion of other odd happenings and left a perfect opening for him to bring up the Lubbock Lights.  He asked me if I’d heard about them.  I said that I had heard a few vague stories.  I hoped that this would stave off any detailed accounts of stories I had been saturated with during the past five days, but it didn’t.  I heard all the details all over again.

As he talked on, I settled back in my seat waiting for a certain thing to happen.  Pretty soon it came.  The rancher hesitated and the tone of his voice changed to a half-proud, half-apologetic tone.  I’d heard this transition many times in the past few months; he was going to tell about the UFO that he had seen.  He was going to tell how he had seen the bluish-green lights.  I was wrong; what he said knocked me out of my boredom.

The same night that the college professors had seen their formation of lights his wife had seen something.  Nobody in Lubbock knew about the story, not even their friends.  He didn’t want anyone to think he and his wife were “crazy.”  He was telling me only because I was a stranger.  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 he told the story, “as white as the sheets she was carrying.”  As close as he could remember, he said, this was about ten minutes before the professors made their first sighting.  He stopped at this point to tell me about his wife, she wasn’t prone to be “flighty” and she “never made up tales.”  This character qualification was also standard for UFO storytellers.  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.  The Albuquerque sighting!  He said he didn’t have any idea what his wife had seen but he thought that it was an interesting story.

It was an interesting story.  It hit me right between the eyes.  I knew the rancher and his wife couldn’t have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple’s story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it.  The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description.  I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period and hesitated to mention it.