On the morning of the Coast Guard photograph the day was exceptionally clear, the sun extremely bright, and the sky a deep blue unusual on the Massachusetts coast. Under these circumstances, objects reflecting the sun look larger and brighter than normal. Because the picture was taken with a dirty lens through a window, the images were further distorted. Since the UFOs did not produce highlights on the tops of the cars in the foreground, as luminous objects overhead would have done, they were probably not in the sky at all. Elaborate Air Force experiments with photo-flood lamps showed that the images were reflections in the window glass from an interior light source behind the camera (see [Plate IVa]).
Weird and frightening apparitions do occur; Air Force files bulge with reports suggesting that unfamiliar objects are moving around us day and night, by land, sea, and air. Imagination endows them with life or turns them into mysterious, saucer-shaped craft manned by creatures from Mars, Venus, or even from some planet of a star beyond our solar system. The UFO photographed over France on October 2, 1954 (a weekend when every French village was reporting saucers by the dozen), shows no details and might be almost anything: a bird, a balloon, a cloud of gossamer, the sun, a plane, or merely the result of a lens defect (see [Plate IVb]).
How many of the UFOs listed in the saucer publications originate from birds, insects, and animals we cannot know, but the number must be large. Most of us have only a sketchy acquaintance with the non-human forms of life that share the earth with us. Seeing an unfamiliar creature suddenly, or a familiar creature under unusual circumstances, we often imagine it to be whatever we most fear—vengeful spirits of the departed, fire-breathing dragons, devils, parachutes, or flying saucers.
The Lubbock Lights
The luminous objects sighted in Texas during the last week of August, 1951, would probably have been explained and forgotten in a week’s time, except for the publication of alleged photographs of the unknowns. This complication converted a simple incident into a conglomerate of puzzles which, though actually unrelated, were lumped together to form a classic Unknown. The most detailed published account of this case[[VI-7], p. 133 ff.] contains a number of statements that differ in detail from those in the official files. When discrepancies exist, the facts as given in this chapter are those in the original Air Force reports[VI-8].
The Saturday night of August 25, 1951, was uncomfortably hot in the Southwest, and many persons spent the evening in the relative coolness out of doors. In the town of Lubbock, a professor of geology was sitting in his yard with two guests, fellow members of the faculty, discussing micrometeorites and counting meteors, which for several nights had been more numerous than usual. The sky was clear and cloudless and seeing conditions were ideal. About 9:20 the men noticed a group of fifteen to twenty lights passing silently overhead, going from north to south. They were obviously not meteors or planes, but disappeared too quickly to be identified. About an hour later a second group of lights appeared, forming a rough semicircle or crescent like a string of beads. Shortly before midnight a third group soared overhead in a random pattern (see [Figure 11]).
Figure 11. Schematic sketch of lights observed by the professors at Lubbock, Texas. Left, pattern in the first and third sightings; right, pattern in the second sighting.
Trying to account for the phenomenon, the men agreed that all three flights had appeared suddenly, not gradually, in about the same part of the sky. Only the second had shown any sort of pattern, all had moved silently from north to south, their luminosity was not constant but had varied in intensity, and all had disappeared suddenly, not gradually, at about the same point in the sky. The men did not agree on the color, which they described as yellowish to white, with a soft glow. The lights had passed too swiftly for the men to locate them in relation to specific stars and there were no clouds in the sky; thus they had no known reference points by which to judge altitude, distance, or size. Since the lights had apparently moved over about 30 degrees of sky in one second, however, and the observers estimated the altitude as 5000 to 50,000 feet, the unknowns must have had an enormous size and an incredible speed of from 1800 to 18,000 miles an hour—typical flying saucers.
Understandably curious, the host telephoned the managing editor of the local newspaper, the Lubbock Evening Avalanche, hoping that a printed account would elicit more information from other persons who had noticed the mysterious lights. The report appeared in the Sunday paper, August 26, but in the days that followed, no reader responded.