The Lubbock Lights
The account
V-shaped formations of lights crossed the Texas sky in front of university professors.
What investigators found
Project Blue Book concluded they were birds reflecting the city's new street lighting.
The story
On the night of August 25, 1951, a group of Texas Tech professors were chatting in a backyard in Lubbock when they saw an arc of faint lights glide silently across the sky. The phenomenon repeated over the following weeks. A student, Carl Hart Jr., photographed V-shaped formations that circulated nationwide and ended up in Air Force files.
Captain Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book investigated and concluded that the lights were flocks of night birds lit from below by the vapor lamps recently installed in the city. Some of the professors never accepted the explanation, and Hart's photos remain debated, since not everyone agrees that birds would appear so sharply.