Lubbock Lights: formations over Lubbock, Texas, August–September 1951 (1951)
V-shaped formations of lights photographed over Lubbock, Texas, in August–September 1951; Project Blue Book's supervisor recorded most of the sightings as official unknowns.
- Case number
- TU-1951-900001
- Date
- 26 August 1951
- Location
- Lubbock, Lubbock County, Texas, United States
- Coordinates
- 33.578° N, 101.855° W
- Shape
- formation
- Colour
- Unknown
- Witnesses
- 9
- Status
- unresolved
Case summary
On the night of 25 August 1951, three Texas Technological College professors — A. G. Oberg, W. L. Ducker and W. I. Robinson — reported watching 20 to 30 lights, as bright as stars but larger, cross the sky over Lubbock at about 9 p.m., dismissing meteors as an explanation. Further clusters were reported on later nights by the professors and by other residents. On the evening of 30 August 1951, Texas Tech student Carl Hart Jr. photographed five frames of a V-shaped formation of 18 to 20 white lights from his parents' back garden; the pictures were syndicated nationally.
The sightings were investigated by Captain Edward Ruppelt, supervisor of the Air Force's Project Blue Book, who concluded that the professors had probably seen migrating plovers reflecting the city's new vapour street lamps, although a Texas Tech biology department head and a game warden rejected that. Ruppelt recorded that the physics laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base could neither prove the Hart photographs genuine nor brand them a hoax, and that, apart from a sighting with a radar return, all the reports were officially classed as unknowns. Ruppelt later wrote that an unnamed scientist had positively identified the lights as a commonplace natural phenomenon but refused to name him.
Nearby strategic sites
- F.E. Warren Air Force Base — 882 km away