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WWW History Com News Lubbock Lights Ufo Sightings
WWW History Com News Lubbock Lights Ufo Sightings
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UPDATED: JAN 10, 2020 · ORIGINAL: AUG 8, 2018
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August 25, 1951 was a quiet summer night in Lubbock, Texas. That
evening, a handful of scientists from Texas Technical College were
hanging out in the backyard of geology professor Dr. W.I. Robinson,
drinking tea and chatting about micrometeorites. It was quite the
brain trust: chemical engineering professor Dr. A. G. Oberg, physics
professor Dr. George and Dr. W. L. Ducker, head of the petroleum-
engineering department.
Which made the story of what they witnessed that night all the
more curious.
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READ MORE: Interactive Map: UFO Sightings Taken Seriously by
the U.S. Government
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The professors weren’t the only credible witnesses to the
mysterious blue-green lights that night. At dusk, in Albuquerque,
New Mexico (about 350 miles away from Lubbock), an employee of
the Atomic Energy Commission’s top-secret Sandia Corporation—a
man with a high-level “Q” security clearance—had been sitting
outside with his wife. According to Ruppelt:
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terrifying in the night sky.
Ruppelt described it this way:
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READ MORE: The 5 Most Credible Modern UFO Sightings
But not everyone had waited for the government to start looking
into the matter. After alerting local papers like the Lubbock
Avalanche-Journal, the Texas Tech professors started their own
informal investigation. In the weeks after their initial August
25sighting, they and their friends observed the lights 12 more
times. They measured the lights’ angles, roughly calculated their
speed and noted that they always traveled from north to south.
Armed with walkie-talkies, the scientist-sleuths and their friends
formed two teams and attempted to measure the UFO’s altitude,
with little success.
As the days went on, more and more Lubbock residents claimed to
have seen the lights. And
SHOWS THISwhen theHISTORY
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reports against what they themselves had seen and recorded,
many of the facts lined up, Ruppelt wrote. Of course, few if any had
recorded the phenomena with the same level of detail as the
professors.
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The Lubbock Lights, photographed by 19-year old Carl Hart, Jr. on August
30, 1951 in Lubbock, Texas.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
It was a warm night and his bed was pushed over next to an open
window. He was looking out at the clear night sky, and had been in
bed about a half hour, when he saw a formation of the lights
appear in the north… cross an open patch of sky, and disappear
over his house. Knowing that the lights might reappear as they had
done in the past, he grabbed his loaded Kodak 35, set the lens and
shutter at f 3.5 and one-tenth of a second, and went out into the
middle of the backyard. Before long, his vigil was rewarded when
the lights made a second pass. He got two pictures. A third
SHOWS THIS DAY IN HISTORY SCHEDULE TOPICS STORIES
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formation went over a few minutes later, and he got three more
pictures.
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Captain Edward Ruppelt, standing between the two seated men, with
other officers of the U.S. Air Force at a 1952 news conference where they
announced the installment of more than 200 cameras in attempts to
obtain data on the unidentified flying objects reported from various parts
of the nation.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
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The old Lamesa man had suggested that the lights were actually
plover birds, a theory to which Ruppelt would lend some credence.
But just like many people Ruppelt interviewed, the old man
admitted he and his wife had been looking for the lights after
reading about them in the paper. This was a common thread tying
together many of the witnesses. “One point of interest was that
very few claimed to have seen the lights before reading the
professors’ story in the paper,” Ruppelt wrote. “But this could get
back to the old question, ‘Do people look up if they have no reason
to do so?’”
So, what exactly did all these people witness? In The Report on
Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt—by all accounts an honorable
and fair man who oversaw what many describe as the “golden age”
of the government’s official UFO investigations—offers a strangely
evasive explanation:
I thought that the professors’ lights might have been some kind of
birds reflecting the light
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wrong. They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they
weren’t spaceships. The lights that the professors saw…have been
positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable
natural phenomenon…I can’t divulge exactly the way the answer
was found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set
up complete instrumentation to track down the lights. Telling the
story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I
promised the man complete anonymity... With the most important
phase of the Lubbock Lights “solved”—the sightings by the
professors—the other phases become only good UFO reports.
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According to Monroe, the professors and other witnesses—tired of
explaining themselves and what they saw—almost totally ceased
giving interviews by the 1970s. In a rare informal interview, more
than 40 years after the sightings, Carl Hart, Jr. reportedly told
author and UFO researcher Kevin D. Randle he still had no
idea what he had photographed that pleasant August night many
moons ago. But like hundreds of others witnesses in and around
Lubbock that strange Texas summer, he saw something he would
never forget.
BY HADLEY MEARES
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