identical to the one that Hart had used and set up a light to move at the same speed as the UFO’s had flown.  We tried to take photographs.  In four seconds we could get only two poor shots.  These were badly blurred, much worse than Hart’s, due to the one-tenth-of-a-second shutter speed.  We repeated our experiment several times, each time with the same results.  This made a lot of people doubt the authenticity of Hart’s photos.

With the completed photo lab report in my hands, I was still without an answer.  The report was interesting but didn’t prove anything.  All I could do was to get opinions from as qualified sources as I could find.  A physiologist at the Aeromedical Laboratory knocked out the timing theory immediately by saying that if Hart had been excited he could have easily taken three photos in four seconds if we could get two in four seconds in our experiment.  Several professional photographers, one of them a top Life photographer, said that if Hart was familiar with his camera and was familiar with panning action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours.  I recalled what I heard about Hart’s having photographed sporting events for the Lubbock newspaper.  This would have called for a good panning technique.

The photographs didn’t tally with the description of the lights that the professors had seen; in fact, they were firmly convinced that they were of “home manufacture.”  The professors had reported soft, glowing lights yet the photos showed what should have been extremely bright lights.  Hart reported a perfect formation while the professors, except for the first flight, reported an unorderly group.  There was no way to explain this disagreement in the arrangement of the lights.  Of course, it wasn’t impossible that on the night that Hart saw the lights they were flying in a V formation.  The first time the professors saw them they were flying in a semicircle.

The intensity of the lights was difficult to explain.  Again I went to the people in the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory.  I asked them if there was any possible situation that could cause this.  They said yes.  An intensely bright light source which had a color far over in the red end of the spectrum, bordering on infrared, could do it.  The eye is not sensitive to such a light, it could appear dim to the eye yet be “bright” to the film.  I asked them what kind of a light source would cause this.  There were several things, if you want to speculate, they said, extremely high temperatures for one.  But this was as far as they would go.  We have nothing in this world that flies that appears dim to the eye yet will show bright on film, they said.

This ended the investigation of the photographs, and the investigation ended at a blank wall.  My official conclusion, which was later given to the press, was that “The photos were never proven to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine.”  There is no definite answer.