rts. The fact that the formations of lights were in
different shapes didn't bother them; in fact, it convinced them all
the more that their ideas of how a spaceship might operate were
correct.

This group of scientists believed that the spaceships, or at least
the part of the spaceship that came relatively close to the earth,
would have to have a highly swept-back wing configuration. And they
believed that for propulsion and control the craft had a series of
small jet orifices all around its edge. Various combinations of these
small jets would be turned on to get various flight attitudes. The
lights that the various observers saw differed in arrangement because
the craft was flying in different flight attitudes.

(Three years later the Canadian Government announced that this was
exactly the way that they had planned to control the flying saucer
that they were trying to build. They had to give up their plans for
the development of the saucer-like craft, but now the project has
been taken over by the U.S. Air Force.)

This is the complete story of the Lubbock Lights as it is carried in
the Air Force files, one of the most interesting and most
controversial collection of UFO sightings ever to be reported to
Project Blue Book. Officially all of the sightings, except the UFO
that was picked up on radar, are unknowns.

Personally I thought that the professors' lights might have been
some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street
lights, but I was wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't refracted
light, but they weren't spaceships. The lights that the professors
saw--the backbone of the Lubbock Light series--have been positively
identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural
phenomenon.

It is very unfortunate that I can't divulge exactly the way the
answer was found because it is an interesting story of how a
scientist set up complete instrumentation to track down the lights
and how he spent several months testing theory after theory until he
finally hit upon the answer. Telling the story would lead to his
identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete
anonymity. But he fully convinced me that he had the answer, and
after having heard hundreds of explanations of UFO's, I don't
convince easily.

With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights "solved"--the
sightings by the professors--the other phases become only good UFO
reports.

CHAPTER NINE

The