The Lubbock Lights: UFOs Over the South Plains

On the night of August twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-one, three professors from Texas Technological College were sitting in someone's backyard, talking. The sky was clear. Around nine in the evening, they looked up and saw something unusual: a V-shaped formation of twenty to thirty lights moving overhead, as bright as stars but larger, moving faster than any bird or aircraft they could identify. Before they could fully process it, a second formation passed over.

The three men were not prone to excitability. They were A.G. Oberg, a chemical engineer; W.L. Ducker, the head of the petroleum engineering department; and W.I. Robinson, a geologist. They reported what they saw to the local newspaper.

Over the following weeks, others in Lubbock reported similar formations. Carl Hemminger, a German professor at Tech, reported sightings. A Tech student named Carl Hart Jr. photographed a formation of the lights on multiple occasions. His photographs were reprinted nationwide, including in Life magazine.

The United States Air Force's Project Blue Book investigated the Lubbock Lights, as they were now being called nationally, and concluded that it found no sign the photographs were faked, and Ruppelt came to believe the lights were most likely birds reflecting the city's new street lights, or possibly moths. Captain Edward Ruppelt, who led the investigation, later wrote that officially all sightings except one radar contact remained classified as unknowns.

Lubbock had new street lights that year. The city had recently installed them. Whether that is the full explanation remains, officially, unresolved. The Lubbock Lights are regarded as one of the first significant UFO cases in American history.