Part 15 (2/2)

It _was_ an interesting story It hit ht between the eyes I knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of theht description I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a si this period and hesitated to et a few more facts from the rancher but he'd told me all he knew At Dallas I boarded an airliner to Dayton and he went on to Baton Rouge, never knohat he'd added to the story of the Lubbock Lights

On the way to Dayton I figured out a plan of attack on the thousands of words of notes I'd taken The best thing to do, I decided, was to treat each sighting in the Lubbock Light series as a separate incident All of them seemed to be dependent upon each other for importance If the objects that were reported in several of the incidents could be identified, the rest would raphs taken by Carl Hart, Jr, becaenda

As soon as I reached Dayton I took Hart's negatives to the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory at Wright Field This laboratory, staffed by the Air Force's top photography experts, did all of our analysis of photographs They went right to work on the negatives and soon had a report

There had originally been five negatives, but e asked to borrow theatives were badly scratched and dirty because so many people had handled thees fro that the lab did was to look at each spot on the negatives to see if it was an actual photographic ie They found that the photos showed an inverted V forht was badly blurred due to motion of the cae they were able to deterraphed were circular, near pinpoint sources of light Like a bright star, or a distant light bulb Next they atives and carefully plotted the position of each light in the forhts in the for to a definite pattern

One additional factor that was brought out in the report was that although the photos were taken on a clear night no iround This proved one thing, the lights, which were overexposed in the photograph, were a great deal brighter than the stars, or the lights affected the filht from the stars

This was all that the photos showed It was iroup, speed, or altitude

The next thing was to try to duplicate what Hart said he had done I enlisted the aid of several friends and we tried to photograph ato Hart in Lubbock, he had taken us to his back yard, where he had shot the pictures He had traced the flight path of fights across the sky We had hihts across the sky It came out to about four seconds We had a caht to move at the saraphs In four seconds we could get only two poor shots These were badly blurred, much worse than Hart's, due to the one-tenth-of-a-second shutter speed We repeated our experiment several times, each time with the same results This made a lot of people doubt the authenticity of Hart's photos

With the completed photo lab report in my hands, I was still without an answer The report was interesting but didn't prove anything All I could do was to get opinions froist at the Aero theory i that if Hart had been excited he could have easily taken three photos in four seconds if we could get two in four seconds in our experiraphers, one of therapher, said that if Hart was fa action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours I recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed sporting events for the Lubbock newspaper This would have called for a good panning technique

The photographs didn't tally with the description of the lights that the professors had seen; in fact, they were firmly convinced that they were of ”hohts yet the photos shohat should have been extrehts Hart reported a perfect forht, reported an unorderly group

There was no way to explain this disagreehts Of course, it wasn't ihts they were flying in a V formation The first ti in a sehts was difficult to explain Again I went to the people in the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory I asked them if there was any possible situation that could cause this They said yes An intensely bright light source which had a color far over in the red end of the spectru on infrared, could do it The eye is not sensitive to such a light, it could appear diht” to the filht source would cause this There were several things, if you want to speculate, they said, extreh teo We have nothing in this world that flies that appears diht on filraphs, and the investigation ended at a blank wall My official conclusion, which was later given to the press, was that ”The photos were never proven to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine” There is no definite answer

The eation was noitched to the professors' sighting The athered see a definite ansas concerned They had s, how much of the sky the objects had crossed in a certain tile froures didn't reat deal, however, since the altitude at which the for was unknown If you assu at an altitude of 10,000 feet you could easily co about 3,600 miles per hour, or five to six times the speed of sound The forht was a separate object it could have been in the neighborhood of 100 feet in diauess since nobody knew if the lights were at, above, or below 10,000 feet If they had been higher they would have been going faster and have been larger If lower than 10,000 feet, slower and smaller

The only solid lead that had developed while the Reese AFB intelligence officer and I were investigating the professors'

sightings was that the UFO's were birds reflecting the city lights; specifically plover The old cowboy fro identical to what the professors described and they were plover Secondly, whenever the professors left the vicinity of their hohts they didn't see them, yet their wives, who stayed at hohts” were birds they would be flying low and couldn't be seen from more than a few hundred feet While in Lubbock I'd noticed several hts I called the intelligence officer at Reese AFB and he airhted streets marked The place where the professors had made their observations was close to one of these streets The big hitch in this theory was that people living hted boulevard had also reported the lights

How estion and how many were authentic I didn't know If I could have found out, it would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be an answer This, however, it was ihts didn't ht be a clue Birds or light phenomena wouldn't make any sound, but how about so at or above the speed of sound? Jet airplanes don't fly as fast as the speed of sound but theyh the air I knew that a great deal of the noise fro out of the tail pipe, but I didn't know exactly how much of the noise this caused If a jet airplane with a silent engine could be built, how et the answer I contacted National Advisory Coovernency which specializes in aeronautical research They didn't know Neither they nor anybody else had ever done any research on this question Their opinion was that such an aircraft could not be heard 5,000 or 10,000 feet away Aerodynareed

I called the Ar Grounds, Maryland, to find out why artillery shells whine

These people develop and test all kinds of shells so they would have an answer if anybody did They said that the majority of the whine of an artillery shell is probably caused by the flat back end of the shell If a perfectly streamlined shell could be used it would not have any perceivable whine

What I found out, or didn't find out, about the sound of an objectat several times the speed of sound was typical of nearly every question that ca in a field where there were no definite answers to questions In so into fields far advanced above the then present levels of research In other instances ere getting into fields where no research had been done at all Itopinions All we could do was hope the opinions ere getting were the best

My attempts to reach a definite conclusion as to what the professors had seen met another blank wall I had noto reach a conclusion on the authenticity of the photographs

A thorough analysis of the reports of the flying wings seen by the retired rancher's wife in Lubbock and the AEC employee and his wife in Albuquerque was made The story from the two ladies who saw the alu near the road near Matador, Texas, was studied, checked, and rechecked Another blank wall on all three of these sightings

By the ti on the report froton State, the data of the weather conditions that existed on the night of the sighting had arrived I turned the incident folder over to the electronics specialists at ATIC They ets were caused by weather, although it was a borderline case They further surets had been picked up on two radars, if I checked I'd find out that the two targets looked different on the two radarscopes This is a characteristic of a weather target picked up on radars operating on different frequencies I did check I called the radar station and talked to the captain as in charge of the crew the night the target had been picked up

The target looked the same on both scopes This was one of the reasons it had been reported, the captain told et hadn't been the same on both scopes, he wouldn't have ht he had a weather target He askedI said that Captain Ja-distance wires between Dayton and Washi+ngtonin swivel chairs miles froree the target was caused by weather But that's the way it officially stands today

Although the case of the Lubbock Lights is officially dead, its ers on There have never been any hts somewhat similar to those seen by the professors have been reported In about 70 per cent of these cases they were proved to be birds reflecting city lights