Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/145

 an image, his friend suggested that he call the newspaper. At first the paper wasn’t interested but then they decided to run the photos. I later found out that they had done some checking of their own.

We went with Hart into his back yard to re-enact what had taken place. He described the lights as being the same dull, glowing bluish-green color as those seen by the professors. The formation was different, however. The lights Hart saw were always flying in a perfect V. He traced the path from where they appeared over some trees in the north, through an open patch of sky over the backyard, to a point where they disappeared over the house. From the flight path he pointed out, the lights had crossed about 120 degrees of open sky in four seconds. This 30-degree-per-second angular velocity corresponded to the professors’ measured angular velocity.

We made arrangements to borrow Hart’s negatives, thanked him for his information, and left.

Armed with a list of names of other observers of the mysterious lights, the intelligence officer and I started out to try to get a cross-section account of the other UFO sightings in the Lubbock area. All the stories about the UFO’s were the same; various types of formations of dull bluish-green lights, generally moving north to south. A few people had variations. One lady saw a flying Venetian blind and another a flying double boiler. One point of interest was that very few claimed to have seen the lights before reading the professor’s story in the paper, but this could get back to the old question, “Do people look up if they have no reason to do so?”

We talked to observers in nearby towns. Their stories were the same. Two of them, tower operators at an airport, reported that they had seen the lights on several occasions.

It was in one of these outlying towns, Lamesa, that we talked to an old gentleman, about eighty years old, who gave us a good lead. He had seen the lights and he had identified them. Ever since he had read the story in the papers he had been looking. One evening he and his wife were in their yard looking for the lights. All of a sudden two or three appeared. They were in view for several seconds, then they were gone. In a few minutes the lights did a repeat performance. The man admitted he had been scared.