Lubbock

The Lubbock Lights

On the evening of 25 August 1951 three professors from Texas Tech were sitting in a garden in Lubbock when a semicircle of bluish lights passed silently overhead. Over the following weeks the formation came back dozens of times, and a student, Carl Hart Jr, photographed it — five frames that went round the country. Project Blue Book examined the negatives, found no sign of a fake, and offered a plain explanation: plovers flying in formation and lit from below by the town's new mercury-vapour streetlights. The professors objected that they had seen the formation before the lights were installed. The argument was never settled, and Hart's photographs remain among the most reproduced in the subject.