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seen by the professors. The formation was different, however. The lights Hart saw were always flying in a perfect V. He traced the path from where they appeared over some trees in the north, through
an open patch of sky over the back yard, to a point where they disappeared over the house. From the flight path he pointed out, the lights had crossed about 120 degrees of open sky in four seconds.
This 30-degree-per-second angular velocity corresponded to the professors' measured angular velocity.
We made arrangements to borrow Hart's negatives, thanked him for his information, and left.
Armed with a list of names of other observers of the mysterious lights, the intelligence officer and I started out to try to get a cross-section account of the other
UFO sightings in the Lubbock area. All the stories about the UFO's were the same; various types of formations of dull bluish-green lights, generally moving north to
south. A few people had variations. One lady saw a flying Venetian blind and another a flying double boiler. One point of interest was that very few claimed to have
seen the lights before reading the professors' story in the paper, but this could get back to the old question, "Do people look up if they have no reason to do
so?"
We talked to observers in nearby towns. Their stories were the same. Two of them, tower operators at an airport, reported that they had seen the lights on several
occasions.
It was in one of these outlying towns, Lamesa, that we talked to an old gentleman, about eighty years old, who gave us a good lead. He had seen the lights and he had
identified them. Ever since he had read the story in the papers he had been looking. One evening he and his wife were in their yard looking for the lights. All of a
sudden two or three appeared. They were in view for several seconds, then they were gone. In a few minutes the lights did a repeat performance. The man admitted he had
been scared. He broke off his story of the lights and launched into his background as a native Texan, with range wars, Indians, and stagecoaches under his belt. What
he was trying to point out was that despite the range wars, Indians, and stagecoaches, he had been scared. His wife had been scared too. We had some difficulty getting
back to the lights but we finally made it. The third time they came around, he said, one of the lights emitted a sound. It said, "Plover." The old gentleman
had immediately identified it as a plover, a water bird about the size of a quail. Later that night, and on several other occasions, they had seen the same thing.
After a few more hair-raising but interesting stories of the old west Texas, we left.
Our next stop was the federal game warden's office in Lubbock. We got the