The Lubbock Lights were a strange pattern of lights seen above the city of Lubbock, Texas, in August and September 1951. The event became widely known across the United States as a possible UFO sighting and was studied by the U.S. Air Force. According to Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, "Officially, all of the sightings, except the UFO that was detected by radar, are still unknown."

The sightings

Edward J. Ruppelt wrote that the first sighting was reported by three professors from Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University), located in Lubbock, on August 25, 1951, around 9 p.m. According to Ruppelt, the professors were sitting in the backyard of one of the professor's homes when they saw 20–30 lights. The lights were as bright as stars but larger, flying overhead. Ruppelt said the professors quickly decided the lights were not meteors. As they talked about what they saw, another group of similar lights flew overhead.

Ruppelt said the professors were A. G. Oberg, a chemical engineer; W. L. Ducker, a department head and petroleum engineer; and W. I. Robinson, a geologist. Robinson reported the sighting to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, a local newspaper. According to UFO author Jerome Clark, three women in Lubbock saw "strange flashing lights" in the sky on the same night as the professors. Carl Hemminger, a professor of German at Texas Tech, also reported seeing the lights that night.

Clark wrote that on September 5, 1951, the three professors, along with E. Richard Heineman, a mathematics professor, and another professor from Texas Tech, were sitting in Robinson’s front yard when the lights flew overhead. Grayson Mead, one of the professors, described the lights as about the size of a dinner plate. They had a greenish-blue, glowing color and were smaller than the full moon at the horizon. There were about 12 to 15 lights. They were perfectly round, and the sight made everyone feel very uneasy. Mead said the lights were not birds, but they moved so quickly that he wished they could have seen them better. Clark noted that the professors saw the lights flying above a thin cloud at about 2,000 feet (610 meters). This helped them estimate the lights were moving faster than 600 miles per hour (970 kilometers per hour).

The Hart photographs

On the evening of August 30, 1951, Carl Hart, Jr., a first-year student at Texas Tech, saw a group of 18–20 white lights arranged in a "V" shape flying overhead. Hart used a 35mm Kodak camera and went to the backyard of his parents’ home to check if the lights would return. Two additional lights passed overhead, and Hart took five photographs before they disappeared. After the photos were developed, Hart brought them to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal newspaper. The editor, Jay Harris, said the newspaper would buy the photos for $10 and publish them, but warned Hart that he would "expel him from town" if the photos were fake. The images were later shared in newspapers across the country and in Life magazine. Scientists at the physics laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio studied the photos. After a detailed analysis, Edward J. Ruppelt, who led the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, told the press that "the [Hart] photos were never proven to be a hoax, but neither were they proven to be genuine." Professors at Texas Tech stated the photos did not match what they had seen, as the objects they observed had flown in a "U" shape instead of a "V" shape.

Air Force investigation and potential explanations

In late September 1951, Ruppelt learned about the Lubbock Lights and studied them as part of Project Blue Book. He traveled to Lubbock and spoke with professors, Carl Hart, and others who said they saw the lights. At the time, Ruppelt believed the professors had seen a type of bird called a plover. The city of Lubbock had installed new vapor street lights in 1951, and Ruppelt thought migrating plovers might have reflected the lights. Some people who supported this idea included T. E. Snider, a local farmer who saw birds flying over a drive-in movie theater on August 31, 1951. The birds' undersides were visible in the light. Another pair of witnesses, Joe Bryant and his wife, saw groups of lights flying overhead on August 25. When a third group of lights passed overhead, they began circling the Bryants' home and were identified by sight and sound as plovers. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer and scientific advisor for Project Blue Book, later spoke with one of the professors, who also said the lights were plovers.

J.C. Cross, head of Texas Tech's biology department, and a game warden interviewed by Ruppelt both said the sightings could not have been birds. Mead, who saw the lights, disagreed with the plover explanation. He said, "these objects were too large for any bird. … I have had enough experience hunting and I don't know of any bird that could go this fast we would not be able to hear…to have gone as fast as this, to be birds, they would have to have been exceedingly low to disappear quite so quickly." William Hams, chief photographer for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, took nighttime photos of birds flying over Lubbock's street lights but could not match Hart's photos.

Regarding the lights, Ruppelt later wrote: "They weren't birds, they weren't refracted light, but they weren't spaceships […] [they were] positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon […] It is very unfortunate that I can't divulge exactly the way the answer was found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set up complete instrumentation to track down the lights and how he spent several months testing theory after theory until he finally hit upon the answer. Telling the story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete anonymity. But he fully convinced me that he had the answer, and after having heard hundreds of explanations of UFO's, I don't convince easily."

The flying wing

While looking into the Lubbock Lights, Ruppelt learned that many people in and around Lubbock said they saw a "flying wing" flying over the city. One witness was the wife of Ducker, who reported that in August 1951, she saw a "large, quiet flying wing" pass over her home. Ruppelt knew that the US Air Force had a "flying wing" jet bomber. He believed that some of the sightings might have been caused by this bomber. However, he could not explain why, according to the witnesses, the wing did not make any noise as it flew overhead.

Publicity and media

In April 1952, Life magazine published an article about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) that included information about the Lubbock Lights. In 1956, a man named Ruppelt wrote a book and included a chapter about the Lubbock Lights incident.

In 1953, the United Kingdom released a movie called Invaders From Mars. The film’s version of the observatory scene was longer, and characters in the movie discussed the Lubbock Lights as possible proof that aliens had visited Earth.

In November 1999, a television station in Dallas, Texas, called KDFW, aired a news report about the Lubbock Lights. A reporter named Richard Ray spoke with Carl Hart, Jr., who took famous photographs of the lights and was questioned by the U.S. Air Force.

The Lubbock Lights were shown in a 2002 television series on the Sci Fi Channel called Taken. In the show, one alien character pretends to be a human in the Lubbock area.

In 2005, a movie titled Lubbock Lights was released. It focused on the music scene in Lubbock and included some ideas from local musicians about what caused the lights.

In 2006, a band from Lubbock called Thrift Store Cowboys created a song named "Lubbock Lights" for their third album, Lay Low While Crawling or Creeping.

In 2019, the History Channel aired a television series called Project Blue Book. The third episode of the series was titled "The Lubbock Lights" and told the story of the Lubbock Lights incident.