The target looked the same on both scopes.  This was one of the reasons it had been reported, the captain told me.  If the target hadn’t been the same on both scopes, he wouldn’t have made the report since he would have thought he had a weather target.  He asked me what ATIC thought about the sighting.  I said that Captain James thought it was weather.  Just before the long-distance wires between Dayton and Washington melted, I caught some comment about people sitting in swivel chairs miles from the closest radarscope. . . .  I took it that he didn’t agree the target was caused by weather.  But that’s the way it officially stands today.

Although the case of the Lubbock Lights is officially dead, its memory lingers on.  There have never been any more reliable reports of “flying wings” but lights somewhat similar to those seen by the professors have been reported.  In about 70 per cent of these cases they were proved to be birds reflecting city lights.

The known elements of the case, the professors’ sightings and the photos, have been dragged back and forth across every type of paper upon which written material appears, from the cheapest, coarsest pulp to the slick Life pages.  Saucer addicts have studied and offered the case as all-conclusive proof, with photos, that UFO’s are interplanetary.  Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard studied the case and ripped the sightings to shreds in Look, Time, and his book, Flying Saucers, with the theory that the professors were merely looking at refracted city lights.  But none of these people even had access to the full report.  This is the first time it has ever been printed.

The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their associations with the government, had complete access to our files.  And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyed fanatics, they were scientists—­rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence experts.  They had banded together to study our UFO reports because they were convinced that some of the UFO’s that were being reported were interplanetary spaceships and the Lubbock series was one of these reports.  The fact that the formations of lights were in different shapes didn’t bother them; in fact, it convinced them all the more that their ideas of how a spaceship might operate were correct.

This group of scientists believed that the spaceships, or at least the part of the spaceship that came relatively close to the earth, would have to have a highly swept-back wing configuration.  And they believed that for propulsion and control the craft had a series of small jet orifices all around its edge.  Various combinations of these small jets would be turned on to get various flight attitudes.  The lights that the various observers saw differed in arrangement because the craft was flying in different flight attitudes.