Wings, Lights, and a Black Eye at Lubbock
During the transition from Grudge to Blue Book, the Air Force investigated an unidentified “flying wing” reported on the evening of August 25, 1951, above east Albuquerque and near Sandia Base, a part of Kirtland AFB. Kirtland was home to Special Weapons Command; the base and surrounding area did research and tests of new weapons and delivery systems—atomic weapons included— particularly those with intercontinental capability. The Sandia witnesses were a security-cleared Sandia guard (off duty) and his wife. The guard estimated that the wing passed silently above his home at about eight hundred to a thousand feet, at three hundred to four hundred miles per hour.
The width of the craft appeared to be about 350 feet (half again the width of America’s enormous B-36 Peacemaker bomber). The wing’s trailing edge showed what the witness described as “six to eight pairs of softly glowing lights.” Retroactive investigation by Blue Book found that the skies that night carried broken clouds at seventeen thousand feet. Visibility was five miles. No Air Force plane was aloft at that spot or time. Further, Kirtland radar showed nothing out of the ordinary. Blue Book personnel determined that the guard was mentally stable. The report seemed credible, and investigators expressed curiosity about similarities between the arrangement of lights on the mysterious flying wing and a similar light formation reported above Lubbock, Texas, on August 25, 1951, the same day as the Sandia sighting.
The so-called Lubbock Lights figure in what may have been the beginning of the end of Blue Book. Although Blue Book carried on until January 1970, perception among the military and the public alike was set when Blue Book struggled to explain what had been sighted in Texas. Lubbock lies 290 miles southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The August 25 sightings had been made by three Texas Tech professors relaxing in a backyard. The three saw twenty to thirty bright lights, flying in a U-shaped formation. Local authorities subsequently took a report of a separate August 25th sighting. After dark on August 30, a Texas Tech freshman named Carl Hart snapped four photographs of about twenty “lights,” forming two lines, which moved across the sky in a V- formation.
Hart took his prints to Lubbock’s daily, the Morning Avalanche. The photos appeared in the paper on September 1, and were shortly picked up by the Associated Press for wire distribution across the country. Professionals at the Avalanche and the AP found no evidence that the photos had been doctored or otherwise faked. The head of the Texas Tech biology department declared that the objects were not birds—a judgment that seemed to be confirmed when an Avalanche photographer took pictures of birds flying above the town’s streetlamps, only to get images too faint to be publishable.
Excited by the photographs, the original trio of witnesses enlisted two colleagues and waited to see the lights again. They did, on September 5, 1951.
The professors saw a bright light (or the lights of multiple objects; they couldn’t be sure) just before the object(s) passed directly overhead. One of the professors, Grayson Mead, counted twelve to fifteen discrete, disc-shaped objects, each showing a green-blue color with a slight fluorescence. From the ground, and with no frame of visual reference, each disc seemed to Mead to be “about the size of a dinner plate.” Mead and the others agreed that there had been no way to accurately estimate the discs’ true sizes.
After the fact, friends and other locals suggested to Mead and his fellow witnesses that the lights had been ground illumination reflected from the bellies of passing birds. Mead, however, had considerable experience as a hunter. He was well familiar with the silhouettes of indigenous fowl, and insisted that the skyborne objects he saw were “absolutely circular.” Another of the professors, W. L. Ducker, agreed that the group had not witnessed birds.
The five academics were not schooled in avionics, but they did hold between them advanced degrees in physics, mathematics, chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, and geology. All agreed that a wisp of cloud in the sky on September 5 likely hung at two thousand feet. The discs passed from clear sky to a spot above the cloud, and then back into the clear again. The professors calculated that the objects had been moving at about six hundred miles per hour.
The professors and others near Lubbock continued to witness nighttime lights until early November, coincident with Edward Ruppelt’s investigative journey to Texas. While there, Ruppelt discovered more than he could comfortably absorb: a Lubbock man who observed flying lights on August 25 while driving; a Lubbock woman frightened by “an airplane without a body” that silently cruised over her house; and sightings by a pair of Air Defense Command radar stations of an unidentified object over Washington State, early in the morning of August 26. Radar indicated the object’s altitude as thirteen thousand feet. An F-86 Sabre jet sent to investigate was not able to intercept before the blip vanished from the radar screens.
Ruppelt soon calculated that if the object sighted on radar was connected to the other objects seen on August 25–26, it had been traveling at about nine hundred miles per hour.
Despite the anomalous aspects of the August–November 1951 sightings, Blue Book finally suggested that the witnesses had seen birds, possibly plovers. As for Ruppelt, although he had been puzzled by many aspects of the sightings, particularly the speed that he himself calculated, he took the opportunity in his 1956 book to identify the Lubbock Lights as moths. Although Ruppelt had departed Blue Book three years earlier, his absurd explanation reflected badly on the project. Yes, the Air Force wanted Blue Book to dissuade the public from the whole idea of flying saucers, but the notion of supersonic moths just invited ridicule. The Air Force expected Blue Book to produce whitewashes, but not at the USAF’s expense.
And though the explanation for Lubbock did not stand up to scrutiny, there was none at all for the “flying wing” sightings.