What happened
On the evening of August 25, 1951, three professors from Texas Technological College were sitting in a backyard when a semicircle of 15–30 faintly glowing, blue-green lights passed over their heads in a few seconds. The formation returned the same night, and in the following weeks the scientists observed it more than a dozen times. On August 31, student Carl Hart Jr. photographed a V-shaped formation of lights from his bedroom window. The photos spread through the press, and Captain Edward Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book, investigated the case personally. On the same evening, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an employee of the Sandia base and his wife saw a huge wing-shaped object fly silently overhead.
Witnesses
Texas Tech professors – geologist W. I. Robinson, chemist A. G. Oberg, and engineer W. L. Ducker – student Carl Hart Jr., and many Lubbock residents.
Explanations and hypotheses
Ruppelt concluded that the lights were reflections of new sodium-vapor streetlights off the undersides of plovers – migratory birds that passed over Texas in large numbers at that time of year. Donald Menzel later endorsed this explanation. Some researchers, however, believe that birds do not account for the brightness of the lights in Hart’s photographs, whose authenticity has never been challenged.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
More: Wikipedia (en)