roller
acknowledged the message and said that he was scrambling all his
alert airplanes from George AFB. Could the two F-86's stay in the
area a few more minutes? They stayed and in a few minutes four more F-
86's arrived. They saw the UFO immediately and took over.

The two F-86's with nearly dry tanks went back to George AFB.

For thirty more minutes the newly arrived F-86's worked in pairs
trying to get up to the UFO's altitude, which they estimated to be
55,000 feet, but they couldn't make it. All the time the UFO kept
slowly circling and speeding up only when the F-86's seemed to get
too close. Then they began to run out of fuel and asked for
permission to break off the intercept.

By this time one remaining F-86 had been alerted and was airborne
toward Long Beach. He passed the four homeward-bound F-86's as he was
going in, but by the time he arrived over Long Beach the UFO was gone.

All the pilots except one reported a "silver airplane with highly
swept-back wings." One pilot said the UFO looked round and silver to
him.

The report ended with a comment by the local intelligence officer.
He'd called Edwards AFB, the big Air Force test base north of Los
Angeles, but they had nothing in the air. The officer concluded that
the UFO was no airplane. In 1951 nothing we had would fly higher than
the F-86.

This was a good report and I decided to dig in. First I had some
more questions I wanted to ask the pilots. I was just in the process
of formulating this set of questions when three better reports came
in. They automatically got a higher priority than the Long Beach
Incident.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Lubbock Lights, Unabridged

When four college professors, a geologist, a chemist, a physicist,
and a petroleum engineer, report seeing the same UFO's on fourteen
different occasions, the event can be classified as, at least,
unusual. Add the facts that hundreds of other people saw these UFO's
and that they were photographed, and the story gets even better. Add
a few more facts--that these UFO's were picked up on radar and that a
few people got a close look at one of them, and the story begins to
convince even the most ardent skeptics.

This was the situation the day the reports of the Lubbock Lights
arrived at ATIC. Actually the Lubbock Lights, as Project Blue Book
calls them, involved many widespread reports. Some of these incidents
are known to the public, but the ones that added the emphasis and
intrigue