about 1,750 feet wide. If each light was a separate object it
could have been in the neighborhood of 100 feet in diameter. These
figures were only a guess since nobody knew if the lights were at,
above, or below 10,000 feet. If they had been higher they would have
been going faster and have been larger. If lower than 10,000 feet,
slower and smaller.

The only solid lead that had developed while the Reese AFB
intelligence officer and I were investigating the professors'
sightings was that the UFO's were birds reflecting the city lights;
specifically plover. The old cowboy from Lamesa had described
something identical to what the professors described and they were
plover. Secondly, whenever the professors left the vicinity of their
homes to look for the lights they didn't see them, yet their wives,
who stayed at home, did see them. If the "lights" were birds they
would be flying low and couldn't be seen from more than a few hundred
feet. While in Lubbock I'd noticed several main boulevards lighted
with the bluish mercury vapor lights. I called the intelligence
officer at Reese AFB and he airmailed me a city map of Lubbock with
the mercury-vapor-lighted streets marked. The place where the
professors had made their observations was close to one of these
streets. The big hitch in this theory was that people living miles
from a mercury-vapor-lighted boulevard had also reported the lights.
How many of these sightings were due to the power of suggestion and
how many were authentic I didn't know. If I could have found out, it
would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if
they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be
an answer. This, however, it was impossible to do.

The fact that the lights didn't make any perceivable sound seemed as
if it might be a clue. Birds or light phenomena wouldn't make any
sound, but how about some object of appreciable size traveling at or
above the speed of sound? Jet airplanes don't fly as fast as the
speed of sound but they make a horrible roar. Artillery shells, which
are going much faster than aircraft, whine as they go through the
air. I knew that a great deal of the noise from a jet is due to the
heated air rushing out of the tail pipe, but I didn't know exactly
how much of the noise this caused. If a jet airplane with a silent
engine could be built, how much noise would it make? How far could it
be heard? To get the answer I contacted National Advi