The Lubbock Lights

Good evening. I've spent thirty years researching UFO cases, and there's one that keeps me up at night. One that changed how I look at everything. I'm talking about the Lubbock Lights of 1951. And here's the thing, this wasn't some farmer out in a field by himself. This was four university professors from Texas Tech, all scientists, sitting in a backyard drinking iced tea and talking about micrometeorites. A geologist named Warren Richardson, a chemical engineer named Arthur Osborn, a petroleum engineer named Walter Duncan, and a physics professor. These were serious men. Trained observers. The kind of witnesses you couldn't ask for if you tried. It was August 25th, 1951, around nine twenty in the evening. They're sitting in Richardson's backyard in Lubbock when suddenly, out of nowhere, a formation of lights streaks across the sky. We're talking fifteen to thirty of them, depending on who you ask. Bluish-green. Bright as stars but bigger. Flying in a V-shape or a semicircle, heading from north to south. The whole thing happened so fast that none of them got a good look. One of them, Richardson I think, later said he'd always told his students to be better observers, and now here he was in that same spot. Couldn't believe what he'd just seen.

But here's the thing, about an hour later, the lights came back. Same formation. Same direction. Same eerie silence. And these professors, they did what scientists do. They started documenting everything. Over the next two weeks, they observed those lights twelve more times. Measured the angles. Calculated the speed. professor witnesses were part of the report - Phoenix' They even got walkie-talkies and split into two teams trying to triangulate the altitude. Couldn't do it. The things were moving too fast. One of the other professors who saw them, a fellow named Gregory Mills, gave what I think is the best description. He said they appeared to be about the size of a dinner plate. Greenish-blue. Slightly fluorescent. Absolutely circular. He said it gave all of them an extremely eerie feeling. Mills was certain they weren't birds. But they went over so fast, he said, that they all wished they could have had a better look. One night they saw a formation pass above a thin cloud layer at about two thousand feet, and from that they figured the lights were traveling over six hundred miles per hour. Six hundred. In 1951, that was faster than most military aircraft.

Now, the professors weren't the only ones. Same night as that first sighting, about twenty minutes earlier, a man in Albuquerque, some 350 miles away, saw something with his wife. This guy worked for the Atomic Energy Commission's Sandia Corporation. Had a Q security clearance, which means he wasn't some crank. He reported seeing a huge flying wing pass over his house, completely silent, with bluish glowing lights along the back edge. The Air Force investigator who looked into all this, a Captain named Edwin Russell, he noticed right away how similar that description was to what the professors saw. But the part of this story that really grabbed the public, that was the photographs. Five nights after the professors' first sighting, a Texas Tech freshman named Calvin Harris was lying in bed looking out his window. He'd read about the lights in the paper. Around eleven thirty at night, he sees a V-formation of eighteen to twenty white lights pass overhead. He grabs his 35-millimeter Kodak, runs out to the backyard, and waits. They came back twice. He got five photographs. Two during the second pass, three during the third. Those photos ended up in Life magazine. Newspapers across the country. They became the face of the whole incident.