HISTORICAL

Lubbock Lights — Three Texas Tech professors observed formations of blue-green lights flying in V-formation over Lubbock. Photographed by a college student, the case attracted USAF investigation.

On the evening of August 25, 1951, three professors from Texas Technological College sitting in a back garden in Lubbock, Texas, watched a V-formation of blue-green lights pass silently overhead. Over the next several weeks, the same formation was repeatedly photographed by an 18-year-old amateur photographer, producing some of the most-published UFO photographs of the early 1950s. 【Background】 Lubbock is a flat, sparsely lit West Texas city. The three professors — geologist W.I. Robinson, physicist W.L. Ducker, and chemical engineer A.G. Oberg — were senior tenured academics chatting in the back yard. 【The Encounter】 At about 9:20 p.m. the three observed roughly 15-20 blue-green luminous objects in a crescent or V formation pass silently overhead at very high apparent speed. Over the following nights, the formation was seen multiple times by the professors, other observers throughout Lubbock, and on at least one occasion by air traffic controllers. On August 30, 18-year-old Carl Hart Jr. photographed the formation with his Kodak 35 camera from his back yard, producing five exposures of the V pattern that were published nationally by Life magazine. 【Investigation】 The US Air Force Project Blue Book investigated and proposed initially that the lights were "plover" — a migratory bird whose feathers can reflect city lights blue-green. The professors, who were senior scientists, publicly rejected the bird hypothesis on the grounds of speed, height, and the simultaneous radar contact at Reese Air Force Base on one of the nights. Blue Book later revised the explanation to "moths illuminated by new mercury-vapour streetlights" and similar variants without ever producing a single conclusive resolution. 【Modern Assessment】 The Lubbock Lights are historically significant as one of the earliest American UFO cases to combine credible academic witnesses, contemporaneous photographs, and concurrent military radar. Carl Hart Jr.'s photographs remain in circulation. Skeptical reanalyses have proposed misidentified migratory birds, while several professional photoanalyses (including by the University of Colorado UFO Project) found the photographs inconsistent with any single bird species. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubbock_Lights

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Source: Wikipedia