Edward Ruppelt (foreground) images of Lubbock Lights incident (background)
Edward J. Ruppelt said he knew what caused the 1951 Lubbock Lights but took the secret to his grave because of a promise.
Hundreds of people in and around the Lubbock area saw strange lights in the sky, in a V or U shape, over two weeks in the late summer of 1951. Carl Hart, Jr., an amateur photographer, captured images showing 18 lights. (The number of lights varied by witness.)
In the years since, almost 70 UFO sightings have been reported in the Lubbock area.
But going back to the famous Lubbock Lights, Ruppelt – then a U.S. Air Force lieutenant – investigated the mystery, dedicating a chapter to it in his 1956 book, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.”
The first sighting came from four Texas Tech professors, back when the school was known as Texas Technological College. Their expertise covered geology, chemical engineering, petroleum engineering and physics.
“If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn’t have picked a more technically qualified group of people,” Ruppelt wrote of the professors.
“This was by far the best combination of UFO reports I’d ever read, and I’d read every one in the Air Force’s files.” – Edward Ruppelt in his 1956 book.
Ruppelt wrote he knew the truth of the Lubbock Lights. Four years later – 1960 – he died of a heart attack at 37.
The next three paragraphs come from his book:
Personally I thought that the professors’ lights might have been some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street lights, but I was wrong. They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they weren’t spaceships. The lights that the professors saw — the backbone of the Lubbock Lights series — have been 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.
With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights “solved” — the sightings by the professors — the other phases become only good UFO reports.
These other “phases” included Hart’s photos and sightings as far away as Matador and Lamesa.
Christian Stepien, chief technology officer for the National UFO Reporting Center, paraphrased Ruppelt as saying, “I know exactly what it was. It was not an alien. But I’m not going to tell you what it was.”
“What can you do with that?” he rhetorically asked.
Why our website is named Lubbock Lights
As we celebrate our first anniversary this month, we wanted to do a story on the 1951 Lubbock Lights.
“I worked for Scripps newspapers in the 1990s in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Their motto was, ‘Give light and the people will find their own way,’” said Terry Greenberg, Lubbock Lights editor.
The company used a lighthouse as its logo and still does today.
“Before we launched our site last year, our board of directors talked about naming the site something like ‘The Lubbock Report,’ but that sounded too much like a daily newspaper. We look for stories other media isn’t doing, so the name Lubbock Lights worked on three levels. 1) It didn’t sound like a daily news product. 2) It reminded me of a motto describing what we do. 3) It was a salute to a bizarre bit of Lubbock history,” he said.
More recent sightings in Lubbock
There are 66 reports from Lubbock to Stepien’s Washington state-based nonprofit organization.
Reports range from something similar to the 1951 Lubbock Lights to triangles or fireballs in the sky, said Stepien, adding Lubbock isn’t unique.
“Go to our site, look at the map. You can see they’re pretty uniformly scattered all over the country. We estimate probably 90 to 95 percent of those are misidentifications,” Stepien said.
They end up as stars, planes, satellites and such. But not all of them.
“People describe something like a giant triangle hovering over their house, making no sound at all, and then suddenly zipping off at Mach 5 or Mach 6,” Stepien said. “When people report the same thing over and over again, you start to see patterns, and you start to see consistency in what they’re describing. It gets extremely hard to discount.”
“There’s no doubt that craft of non-human origin have been flying around in our skies since the ‘40s. There’s no question about that,” Stepien declared.
Government officials are not telling what they know – not in 1951 and not now, he said.
Meanwhile, back in 1951
Ruppelt’s book had a “phase” from Albuquerque. Had it not been for that, Ruppelt might not have gone to Lubbock.
Ruppelt got three reports in the mail while working at the Air Force Technical Intelligence Center. One came from Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, one from a radar station in Washington state and another from Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque.
He opened the one from Albuquerque first.
“The report said that on the evening of August 25, 1951, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission’s super-secret Sandia Corporation and his wife had seen a UFO,” Ruppelt wrote.
This man and his wife were sitting in the back yard of their home on the outskirts of Albuquerque. They were startled at the sight of a huge airplane flying fast and silently, Ruppelt recorded. They estimated it was 800 to 1,000 feet high in the shape of a “flying wing.”
“The man’s background was checked. He had a ‘Q’ security clearance. This summed up his character, oddballs don’t get ‘Q’ clearances,” Ruppelt wrote.
“I picked up the letter from Lubbock next. It was a thick report, and from the photographs that were attached, it looked interesting. I thumbed through it and stopped at the photos. The first thing that struck me was the similarity between these photos and the report I’d just read. They showed a series of lights in a V shape, very similar to those described as being on the aft edge of the ‘flying wing’ that was reported from Albuquerque. This was something unique, so I read the report in detail,” Ruppelt wrote.
He estimated 20 minutes between the two sightings. From Albuquerque to Lubbock, that works out to 900 miles an hour.
“This was by far the best combination of UFO reports I’d ever read, and I’d read every one in the Air Force’s files,” Ruppelt wrote.
At first, the radar station report from Washington State seemed to be related as well. But it was determined to be a weather event.
Ruppelt rushed the Lubbock Lights photos to the Atomic Energy Commission employee (the one with the ‘Q’ clearance) at Kirtland AFB. Word got back to him. This is what the employee and his wife saw. The number of lights was not the same but everything else checked out.
Ruppelt flew to Lubbock the next day.
The professors’ story
One professor hosted the other three in his backyard for a discussion of micrometeorites. At 9:20 p.m. a formation of lights streaked across the sky, Ruppelt recorded.
“It all happened so fast that none of them had a chance to get a good look. One of the men mentioned that he had always admonished his students for not being more observant; now he was in that spot,” Ruppelt wrote.
They got another chance. The lights came back the same night and again night-after-night giving them 12 more observations. Hundreds of other people also saw the lights and the professors tried to question them.
“But the professors learned what I already knew, people are poor observers,” Ruppelt said.
One of the professors convinced the Avalanche-Journal to do a story and Hart convinced the newspaper to reprint his photographs.
‘Raised hell with him’
Ruppelt interviewed Hart and didn’t think he was lying. Hart read about the professors’ story in the paper. On the night of August 31, he saw the lights through his bedroom window.
The lights came back and this time Hart was ready in his backyard with his camera, snapping two pictures. The lights reappeared one more time. He shot three more frames.
A friend developed the photos and Hart told Ruppelt he was surprised anything actually showed up on film. The lights showed up brighter on film than what Hart saw in person.
Ruppelt learned from the photo lab objects that are glowing hot might show up dim to the human eye but brighter on film.
“An intensely bright light source which had a color far over in the red end of the spectrum, bordering on infrared, could do it,” he wrote.
As for scrutinizing Hart, the book did not go into detail, but the declassified government report did.
Before the Avalanche-Journal printed the photos, Jay Harris, the paper’s managing editor, spoke with Hart, “raised hell with him,” telling him the consequences if the photos were a hoax.
Hart stood by his story.
Hart previously shot photos of sporting events for the paper. He was seen as a conscientious person trying to pick up a little extra money with his photos. The paper paid between $7.50 and $10 for the pictures, the report said.
Harris told Ruppelt, as documented in the report, if Hart faked the photos then, “ … He is the best in the business and wasting his time in college.”
Ruppelt asked to borrow the negatives for analysis at an Air Force photo lab.
“There had originally been five negatives, but when we asked to borrow them, Hart could only produce four. The negatives were badly scratched and dirty because so many people had handled them, so it was difficult to tell the actual photographic images from the dust spots and scratches,” Ruppelt wrote in his book.
Everything was measured on the negatives down to the thousandth of an inch.
“My official conclusion, which was later given to the press, was that ‘The photos were never proven to be a hoax, but neither were they proven to be genuine.’ There is no definite answer,” Ruppelt wrote.
Case closed
A series of government reports were declassified including one written sometime during or after 1959. It provided a conclusion, but it was not signed or dated. Ostensibly it was not written by Ruppelt.
In this particular report, the government confidently stated the lights were migratory birds of some sort reflecting the streetlights below.
The conclusion mentions Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who had been hired by the government as part of Project Blue Book (the codename given to the Air Force investigation of UFOs, which Ruppelt worked on).
In 1959, Hynek contacted one of the Texas Tech professors.
“This professor informed Dr. Hynek that he had conducted an extensive study of the Lubbock sighting and determined that they were definitely birds. The Air Force conclusion is that birds, with the streetlights reflecting from them, were the probable cause of this sighting,” the report said.
What kind of birds?
“Since plovers do not usually fly in formation of more than six or seven, ducks become the more probable. The fact that this was late summer, and the objects consistently flew to the south tends to substantiate the conclusion that the objects of this sighting were migratory birds,” the latter report stated.
But that’s in conflict with Ruppelt’s book.
To repeat a small portion from earlier, Ruppelt wrote, “They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they weren’t spaceships.”
The Lubbock Lights have been, Ruppelt said, “positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon.”
Are the Lubbock Lights still with us?
Something similar to the Lubbock Lights was anonymously reported near 50th Street and Memphis Avenue in 2023.
“I was on my front porch looking north and all of a sudden I seen (sic) a V-shaped formation with five hazy white lights appearing out of nowhere,” the report said. “ … The lights were a lot larger than the stars, almost like streetlights in the sky. … The lights weren’t bright white but almost a soft hazy white.”
Stepien was asked if maybe this was a copycat report.
“I don’t think the phenomenon has gone away by any means and I don’t really think it’s a copycat,” he said.
And in late 2022, there was this report near Monterey High School: “V-shaped object with about 8-10 dim white lights passed southbound directly over Lubbock.”
Interestingly, the original 1951 incident does not appear in the database.
“We’re thinking about going in and finding some of these more well-known historical cases and putting them into the databases,” Stepien said.
But for now, the reports come only from the general public.
Stepien said if anyone is still alive who saw the 1951 Lubbock Lights, please do report them.
“We strongly encourage everyone to file a report whether they saw something yesterday or they saw something 50 years ago. It doesn’t matter. We want to collect all of this data and have it in one central place,” he said.
New interviews with original witnesses from 1951 might help solve the case. Or maybe the lights might show up again.
“If somebody got their cell phone pointed in the right direction at the right time and got a great video, that would certainly help,” Stepien said.
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