d it looked like "an airplane without a body." On the back
edge of the wing were pairs of glowing bluish lights. The Albuquerque
sighting! He said he didn't have any idea what his wife had seen but
he thought that it was an interesting story.

It _was_ an interesting story. It hit me right between the eyes. I
knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the
Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew
about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were
infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard
Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in
Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the Southwest had seen a similar
UFO during this period and hesitated to mention it.

I tried to get a few more facts from the rancher but he'd told me
all he knew. At Dallas I boarded an airliner to Dayton and he went on
to Baton Rouge, never knowing what he'd added to the story of the
Lubbock Lights.

On the way to Dayton I figured out a plan of attack on the thousands
of words of notes I'd taken. The best thing to do, I decided, was to
treat each sighting in the Lubbock Light series as a separate
incident. All of them seemed to be dependent upon each other for
importance. If the objects that were reported in several of the
incidents could be identified, the rest would merely become average
UFO reports. The photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr., became number
one on the agenda.

As soon as I reached Dayton I took Hart's negatives to the Photo
Reconnaissance Laboratory at Wright Field. This laboratory, staffed
by the Air Force's top photography experts, did all of our analysis
of photographs. They went right to work on the negatives and soon had
a report.

There had originally been five negatives, but when we asked to
borrow them Hart could only produce four. The negatives were badly
scratched and dirty because so many people had handled them, so it
was difficult to tell the actual photographic images from the dust
spots and scratches. The first thing that the lab did was to look at
each spot on the negatives to see if it was an actual photographic
image. They found that the photos showed an inverted V formation of
lights. In each photo the individual image of a light was badly
blurred due to motion of the camera, but by careful scrutiny of each
blurred image they were able to determine that the original lights
that Hart had photographed were circul