Let's head south to Texas and back in time to the 1950s.
UFO mania is in high gear, especially in Lubbock,
the site of a peculiar phenomenon
that is still being debated today.
[Tony]
18-year-old Carl Hart, Jr.
has his bed pushed next to an open window
in his Lubbock, Texas home.
He's waiting for a strange recurring phenomenon
he'd read about in the papers.
Suddenly, it appears.
Hart grabs his camera and runs out into the backyard
to capture the stunning sight.
A V-shaped formation of 15 to 30 lights
-appears in the night sky.
Eyewitnesses say the lights were bluish green in color,
traveling silently overhead from north to south.
The lights then disappeared,
only to reappear a few minutes later.
Writer Amy Teitel says Carl's sighting
wasn't the first time these lights were witnessed.
Five days earlier on August 25th,
the same formation appeared in the sky
in view of three college professors,
one of which was an engineer,
and another was a physicist.
If any group of people had the skills
to figure out what this was, it was that group.
[Tony]
the professors would often observe these lights
two or three times a night for the next few weeks
before they disappeared forever.
Despite no shortage of eyewitnesses,
Carl was the only one able to successfully
capture the lights on film.
[Amy]
by the U.S. Air Force
and eventually the FBI
as part of Project Blue Book.
[Tony]
for the systematic study of UFOs
by the U.S. Air Force from 1947 to 1969.
[Amy]
who was the lead investigator on Project Blue Book,
also got in on Hart's story.
He looked at the negatives of the photographs
and determined they were authentic
and untempered with.
[Tony]
About 700 of them
were determined to be genuine UFOs,
including the Lubbock Lights.
However, Lieutenant Ruppelt
also conducted his own investigation,
and later claimed to have learned
what caused the Lubbock Lights.
But don't get excited just yet.
On the condition that he remain anonymous,
a scientist confided in Ruppelt
that these lights were actually consistent
with a naturally occurring phenomenon.
Ruppelt kept the secret of what the natural phenomenon is,
because he realized that any discussion
or any information
would lead people back to the scientist.
[Tony]
as far as we're concerned,
the Lubbock Lights remain an unsolved mystery.
No one knows exactly what these lights are,
and many question that Ruppelt ever had
an anonymous scientific source.
Whatever this naturally occurring phenomena is,
it has eluded other scientists for decades.
This isn't your typical UFO sighting.
This happened multiple times a night over two weeks,
and hundreds of people saw it,
but we still don't have confirmation of what it was.
Unless you believe Lieutenant Ruppelt
really did have an anonymous source
who figured it out.
Let's see if our experts can shed some light
on this mystery.
First, we had astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy
analyze a popular theory
that the lights were actually plovers,
migrating birds local to Lubbock,
that were reflecting the streetlights below them.
Birds generally aren't going to be reflective enough
to shine this brightly at night.
I've photographed birds at night many times.
They never show up as brighter than the surrounding sky.
The birds are always silhouetted.
These lights were incredibly bright.
[Tony]
were secret military craft,
but military aviation expert Tim McMillan has his doubts.
If we are to assume that each of the points of light
that are on the photograph are an individual aircraft,
that would suggest that these would be aircraft
that are extremely densely packed together,
far more so than what would be safe
in conventional airborne operations.
And so it leads me to believe that we're not looking
at individual planes.
[Tony]
with several lights?
But according to Ruppelt's independent investigation,
the Lubbock Lights were thought to be flying
at an altitude of only 800 to 1,000 feet,
just a fraction of the height
of a standard commercial aircraft.
McMillan says any plane at that altitude
should have been heard as well as seen.
[Tim]
The idea that you would be able to do that silently,
it's not consistent with the technology
we have today,
much less in 1951.
[Tony]
He claimed the Lubbock lights were quote...
We asked meteorologist Juan Hernandez
what that could possibly refer to.
[Juan]
The reports say that this happened
over and over continuous days.
That is unlike weather, the wind conditions,
the temperature, all that is gonna change
on a day-to-day basis.
It's not astronomical either.
Whether we're talking about meteors or comets,
objects from outer space
never fall in perfect formation.
[Tony]
Whether or not it's out of this world,
that's not for me to decide.
Our verdict? The same as Project Blue Book's.
We're calling this a genuine UFO,
at least until Lieutenant Ruppelt's
anonymous source is revealed,
along with his explanation.