e speed
required to take off in a Cub airplane." They drove on down the road
about 50 more yards, stopped, and got out of the car. The object,
which they estimated to be the size of a B-29 fuselage, was still
drifting along slowly. There was no sign of any exhaust blast and
they heard no noise, but they did see a "porthole" in the side of the
object. In a few seconds the object began to pick up speed and
rapidly climb out of sight. As it climbed it seemed to have a tight
spiraling motion.
The investigation showed that the two ladies were "solid citizens,"
with absolutely no talents, or reasons, for fabricating such a story.
The daughter was fairly familiar with aircraft. Her husband was an
Air Force officer then in Korea, and she had been living near air
bases for several years. The ladies had said that the object was
"drifting" to the east, which possibly indicated that it was moving
with the wind, but on further investigation it was found that it was
moving _into_ the wind.
The two investigators had worked all day and hadn't come up with the
slightest indication of an answer.
This added the final section to my now voluminous report on the
Lubbock affair.
The next morning as I rode to the airport to catch an airliner back
to Dayton I tried to put the whole puzzle together. It was hard to
believe that all Fd heard was real. Did a huge flying wing pass over
Albuquerque and travel 250 miles to Lubbock in about fifteen minutes?
This would be about 900 miles per hour. Did the radar station in
Washington pick up the same thing? I'd checked the distances on the
big wall map in flight operations just before leaving Reese AFB. It
was 1,300 miles from Lubbock to the radar site. From talking to
people, we decided that the lights were apparently still around
Lubbock at 11:20P.M. and the radar picked them up just after
midnight. They would have had to be traveling about 780 miles per
hour. This was fairly close to the 900-mile-per-hour speed clocked by
the two radars. The photos of the Lubbock Lights checked with the
description of what the AEC employee and his wife had seen in
Albuquerque. Nobody in Lubbock, however, had reported seeing a
"flying wing" with lights. All of this was swimming around in my mind
when I stepped out of the staff car at the Lubbock airport.
My plane had already landed so I checked in at the ticket counter,
picked up a morning paper, and ran out and got into the airplane. I
sat down next to a
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