ifferent on the two
radarscopes. This is a characteristic of a weather target picked up
on radars operating on different frequencies. I did check. I called
the radar station and talked to the captain who was in charge of the
crew the night the target had been picked up.
The target looked the same on both scopes. This was one of the
reasons it had been reported, the captain told me. If the target
hadn't been the same on both scopes, he wouldn't have made the report
since he would have thought he had a weather target. He asked me what
ATIC thought about the sighting. I said that Captain James thought it
was weather. Just before the long-distance wires between Dayton and
Washington melted, I caught some comment about people sitting in
swivel chairs miles from the closest radarscope. . . . I took it that
he didn't agree the target was caused by weather. But that's the way
it officially stands today.
Although the case of the Lubbock Lights is officially dead, its
memory lingers on. There have never been any more reliable reports of
"flying wings" but lights somewhat similar to those seen by the
professors have been reported. In about 70 per cent of these cases
they were proved to be birds reflecting city lights.
The known elements of the case, the professors' sightings and the
photos, have been dragged back and forth across every type of paper
upon which written material appears, from the cheapest, coarsest pulp
to the slick _Life_ pages. Saucer addicts have studied and offered
the case as all-conclusive proof, with photos, that UFO's are
interplanetary. Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard studied the case and
ripped the sightings to shreds in _Look_, _Time_, and his book,
_Flying_ _Saucers_, with the theory that the professors were merely
looking at refracted city lights. But none of these people even had
access to the full report. This is the first time it has ever been
printed.
The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the
complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their
associations with the government, had complete access to our files.
And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyed fanatics, they
were scientists--rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence
experts. They had banded together to study our UFO reports because
they were convinced that some of the UFO's that were being reported
were interplanetary spaceships and the Lubbock series was one of
these repo
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