as to the length of time they had seen the lights and
angles at which they had seen them, but the professors learned what I
already knew, people are poor observers.
Naturally there has been much discussion among the professors and
their friends as to the nature of the lights. A few simple
mathematical calculations showed that if the lights were very high
they would be traveling very fast. The possibility that they were
some natural phenomena was, of course, discussed and seriously
considered. The professors did a lot of thinking and research and
decided that if they were natural phenomena they were something
altogether new. Dr. George, who has since died, studied the phenomena
of the night sky during his years as a professor at the University of
Alaska, and he had never seen or heard of anything like this before.
This was the professors' story. It was early in the morning when we
returned to Reese AFB. I sat up a few more hours unsuccessfully
trying to figure out what they had seen.
The next day I again met the intelligence officer and we went to
talk to Carl Hart, Jr., the amateur photographer who had taken the
pictures of the lights. Hart was a freshman at Texas Tech. His story
was that on the night of August 31 he was lying in his bed in an
upstairs room of the Hart home. He, like everyone else in Lubbock,
had heard about the lights but he had never seen them. It was a warm
night and his bed was pushed over next to an open window. He was
looking out at the clear night sky, and had been in bed about a half
hour, when he saw a formation of the lights appear in the north,
cross an open patch of sky, and disappear over his house. Knowing
that the lights might reappear as they had done in the past, he
grabbed his loaded Kodak 35, set the lens and shutter at f 3.5 and
one tenth of a second, and went out into the middle of the back yard.
Before long his vigil was rewarded when the lights made a second
pass. He got two pictures. A third formation went over a few minutes
later and he got three more pictures. The next morning bright and
early Hart said he took the roll of unexposed film to a friend who
ran a photo-finishing shop. He explained that he did all of his film
processing in this friend's lab. He told the friend about the
pictures and they quickly developed them.
I stopped Hart at this point and asked why he didn't get more
excited about what could be the biggest news photos of the century.
He said that the l
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