Then on Friday August 31, five days after the original story had appeared and apparently died, it suddenly came to life. A college freshman who occasionally sold news photographs to the Lubbock paper brought in five pictures of a group of mysterious lights he had photographed the night before. He had been lying in bed next to an open window, he explained, and shortly before midnight he had observed a formation of brilliant lights moving rapidly across the sky. Grabbing his camera, a Kodak 35-mm., he had rushed out into the yard and, after a brief wait, had been able to photograph two similar flights that raced overhead a few minutes apart. Each light had been brighter than Venus, they had maintained a perfect V formation, and had sped from horizon to horizon in a mere four or five seconds. Yet this amazing apparition had apparently gone unnoticed by all except the lucky amateur.
Fearing a hoax, both the editor and the staff photographer hesitated but, since the negatives displayed no obvious evidence of fraud, they finally bought and printed the pictures and distributed them over the country through the United Press.
People all over the nation could now argue the question: What were the Lubbock lights? A few said flying saucers. Many Texans said ducks, plover, or other migratory fowl. But the things in the pictures didn’t look like birds; and if they weren’t birds, what were they? Some persons bluntly called them a hoax.
Impelled perhaps by the growing publicity, the staff photographer of the Evening Avalanche several times tried to duplicate the pictures by photographing flights of birds at night. He allowed himself better equipment—a Speedgraphic camera loaded with a tungsten ASA 80 film, and a GE no. 22 flashbulb in a concentrating reflector. Opening the camera to f 4.7 at 1/10 second, he went up to the roof of the newspaper building to try his luck. After a brief wait he was able to photograph a flock of birds that appeared high overhead, reflecting the mercury-vapor lights of the street, flying noiselessly in a “ragged” V formation, but the image on the negative proved too faint for use. The next night he tried again, using a Kodak Reflex set at f 3.5, Super XX film, at 1/10 second, plus the flashbulb and concentrating reflector. The birds appeared on schedule, but again the images proved too faint for use. The experimenter concluded, probably correctly, that the amateur must have photographed something much brighter than birds.
Not until late October, nearly two months after the original incident, did the Air Force receive official notice of the mystery at Lubbock, and Captain Ruppelt of ATIC arrived to interview witnesses in Lubbock and the neighboring towns of Lamessa, Brownfield, and Big Spring. He quickly discovered that he had two mysteries to solve instead of one since, according to the witnesses who had started all the excitement, the objects shown in the pictures were wholly unlike the luminous phenomena observed by the three professors. The pictured lights formed a perfectly geometrical, flat V, while the original objects had formed a random pattern. Furthermore the pictures showed brilliant, sharply outlined lights as intense as unshaded electric bulbs, while the original objects had been softly glowing.
Meanwhile the professors themselves had been trying to solve their own mystery. During September and October they had observed at least a dozen similar flights, and in an attempt to obtain the true altitude of the objects they had organized a field survey, operating in the country to achieve better seeing conditions. Two groups of observers were stationed at two different points, a measured distance apart, with radio communication between the two. By making simultaneous observations, they hoped to calculate the true height of the objects and thus obtain accurate estimates of size and speed. This well-planned experiment failed because the lights never appeared to the watchers in the country even on nights when they were clearly visible in the town. Nevertheless the scientists did establish one fact: the altitude could not be as high as 50,000 feet, their original estimate. An astronomer in the group, calculating from the few data available, showed that the height must have been only 2000 to 3000 feet, less than a tenth of the first estimate.
Continuing his investigation, Captain Ruppelt found that other persons had seen the lights on the night of August 25—and identified them.
At Brownfield, Texas, some thirty miles from Lubbock, a rancher and his wife had been sitting in their back yard when they noticed a group of fifteen to twenty lights flying overhead from north to south, silently, in no particular formation. They appeared to be very high and had “a kind of glow, a little bigger than a star.” Some time later a second group flew over. When a third group appeared, flying lower, he could see that they were birds; as they moved on to the south and one of the birds emitted a cry, he recognized the familiar call of the plover. Plover have a wing span of a foot and their oily white breasts form an excellent surface for reflecting the lights beneath them.
Like most old-time residents of the area, the rancher was accustomed to the yearly exodus of migratory fowl. Traveling at night in groups of six to twenty, they usually flew at 1000 feet or lower at a maximum speed of about fifty miles an hour in the weeks from late August to mid-November. The rancher had read about the professors’ sighting, which sounded exactly like his own. It would have baffled him, too, he said, if he had not gotten a good look when the third flight circled the house and if he had not happened to hear the single call.
Another resident reported, much later, that he had often seen such lights and recognized them as birds. One night he had noticed “a formation of ducks pass over so low that you could actually see the whole bodies with their shiny white undersides glowing.” At other times he had seen ducks flying at low altitudes with only the undersides glowing and creating an illusion of objects moving very fast at a high altitude[[VI-9]].