I tried to get a few more facts from the rancher but he’d told me all he knew.  At Dallas I boarded an airliner to Dayton and he went on to Baton Rouge, never knowing what he’d added to the story of the Lubbock Lights.

On the way to Dayton I figured out a plan of attack on the thousands of words of notes I’d taken.  The best thing to do, I decided, was to treat each sighting in the Lubbock Light series as a separate incident.  All of them seemed to be dependent upon each other for importance.  If the objects that were reported in several of the incidents could be identified, the rest would merely become average UFO reports.  The photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr., became number one on the agenda.

As soon as I reached Dayton I took Hart’s negatives to the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory at Wright Field.  This laboratory, staffed by the Air Force’s top photography experts, did all of our analysis of photographs.  They went right to work on the negatives and soon had a report.

There had originally been five negatives, but when we asked to borrow them Hart could only produce four.  The negatives were badly scratched and dirty because so many people had handled them, so it was difficult to tell the actual photographic images from the dust spots and scratches.  The first thing that the lab did was to look at each spot on the negatives to see if it was an actual photographic image.  They found that the photos showed an inverted V formation of lights.  In each photo the individual image of a light was badly blurred due to motion of the camera, but by careful scrutiny of each blurred image they were able to determine that the original lights that Hart had photographed were circular, near pinpoint sources of light.  Like a bright star, or a distant light bulb.  Next they made enlargements from the negatives and carefully plotted the position of each light in the formation.

In each photograph the individual lights in the formation shifted position according to a definite pattern.

One additional factor that was brought out in the report was that although the photos were taken on a clear night no images of the stars could be found in the background.  This proved one thing, the lights, which were overexposed in the photograph, were a great deal brighter than the stars, or the lights affected the film more than the light from the stars.

This was all that the photos showed.  It was impossible to determine the size of each image of the group, speed, or altitude.

The next thing was to try to duplicate what Hart said he had done.  I enlisted the aid of several friends and we tried to photograph a moving light.  When we were talking to Hart in Lubbock, he had taken us to his back yard, where he had shot the pictures.  He had traced the flight path of fights across the sky.  We had him estimate the speed by following an imaginary flight of lights across the sky.  It came out to about four seconds.  We had a camera