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.

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The Vashka and the Piece of Alloy

The Vashka River in the Udorsky District of the Komi Republic is a remote tributary of the Mezen flowing through dense northern taiga. The location gained national and international renown in the summer of 1976 when a strange metallic fragment (known as the "Vashka Find") was discovered on a river gravel bar, becoming a central physical artifact in Soviet ufological lore.