Formations of lights seen over Lubbock, Texas, across several nights, and photographs of them taken by a college freshman, as described in the 1952 talk released by PURSUE as DOW-UAP-D154 and credited to Edward J. Ruppelt.
In the talk, five college professors from Texas Tech, discussing meteors one evening, given as August 25th, saw a bunch of lights go over, and over five or six nights logged 12 of the objects. They measured 30 degrees per second across the sky, which the speaker calls the only measurement the office had on these things. The freshman’s photographs of two formations are dated the 31st of August. The Office of Special Investigations offered to let him back out if he would confess; he signed a sworn statement instead. The professors said the pictures were faked, what they had seen being too dim to photograph. The speaker reckons ducks would have to be flying about 75 to 80 feet up at 60 miles an hour, and says attempts to photograph ducks at night by the reflection of the city lights found it impossible.
The transcript names no witness and gives no year for the sightings; the talk itself is dated to March 1952 by its summary. The case later became one of the best known in the files of Project Blue Book.
Connections
Edward J. Ruppelt · Project Blue Book · PURSUE · Air Technical Intelligence Center · Green Fireballs