The emphasis of the investigation was now switched to the professors’ sighting.  The meager amount of data that they had gathered seemed to be accurate but it was inconclusive as far as getting a definite answer was concerned.  They had measured two things, how much of the sky the objects had crossed in a certain time and the angle from one side of the formation to the other.  These figures didn’t mean a great deal, however, since the altitude at which the formation of lights was flying was unknown.  If you assumed that the objects were flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet you could easily compute that they were traveling about 3,600 miles per hour, or five to six times the speed of sound.  The formation would have been about 1,750 feet wide.  If each light was a separate object it could have been in the neighborhood of 100 feet in diameter.  These figures were only a guess since nobody knew if the lights were at, above, or below 10,000 feet.  If they had been higher they would have been going faster and have been larger.  If lower than 10,000 feet, slower and smaller.

The only solid lead that had developed while the Reese AFB intelligence officer and I were investigating the professors’ sightings was that the UFO’s were birds reflecting the city lights; specifically plover.  The old cowboy from Lamesa had described something identical to what the professors described and they were plover.  Secondly, whenever the professors left the vicinity of their homes to look for the lights they didn’t see them, yet their wives, who stayed at home, did see them.  If the “lights” were birds they would be flying low and couldn’t be seen from more than a few hundred feet.  While in Lubbock I’d noticed several main boulevards lighted with the bluish mercury vapor lights.  I called the intelligence officer at Reese AFB and he airmailed me a city map of Lubbock with the mercury-vapor-lighted streets marked.  The place where the professors had made their observations was close to one of these streets.  The big hitch in this theory was that people living miles from a mercury-vapor-lighted boulevard had also reported the lights.  How many of these sightings were due to the power of suggestion and how many were authentic I didn’t know.  If I could have found out, it would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be an answer.  This, however, it was impossible to do.

The fact that the lights didn’t make any perceivable sound seemed as if it might be a clue.  Birds or light phenomena wouldn’t make any sound, but how about some object of appreciable size traveling at or above the speed of sound?  Jet airplanes don’t fly as fast as the speed of sound but they make a horrible roar.  Artillery shells, which are going much faster than aircraft, whine as they go through the air.  I knew that a great deal of the noise from a jet is due to the heated air rushing out of the tail pipe, but I didn’t know exactly