114
I took it that he didn't agree 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 memory lingers on. There have never been any more reliable reports of "flying wings" but
lights 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.
The known elements of the case, the professors' sightings and the photos, have been dragged back and forth across every type of paper upon which written material
appears, from the cheapest, coarsest pulp to the slick Life pages. Saucer addicts have studied and offered the case as all-conclusive proof, with photos, that UFO's
are interplanetary. Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard studied the case and ripped the sightings to shreds in Look, Time, and his book, Flying Saucers, with the
theory that the professors were merely looking at refracted city lights. But none of these people even had access to the full report. This is the first time it has
ever been printed.
The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their associations with the
government, had complete access to our files. And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyed fanatics, they were scientists--rocket experts, nuclear physicists,
and intelligence experts. They had banded together to study our UFO reports because they were convinced that some of the UFO's that were being reported were
interplanetary spaceships and the Lubbock series was one of these reports. The fact that the formations of lights were in different shapes didn't bother them; in fact,
it convinced them all the more that their ideas of how a spaceship might operate were correct.
This group of scientists believed that the spaceships, or at least the part of the spaceship that came relatively close to the earth, would have to have a highly
swept-back wing configuration. And they believed that for propulsion and control the craft had a series of small jet orifices all around its edge. Various combinations
of these small jets would be turned on to get various flight attitudes. The lights that the various observers saw differed in arrangement because the craft was flying
in different flight attitudes.
(Three years later the Canadian Government announced that this was exactly the way that they had planned to control the flying saucer that they were trying to build.
They had to give up their plans for the development of the saucer-like craft, but now the project has been taken over by the U.S. Air Force.)
This is the complete story of the Lubbock Lights as it is carried in the Air Force files, one of the most interesting and most controversial collection of