On August 25, 1951, three college professors relaxing in a backyard in Lubbock, Texas, saw a formation of about twenty to thirty soft, glowing, bluish-green lights silently pass over them. They saw a similar group of lights a few hours later. The lights seemed to move “exactly” together. During the next two months, they saw at least ten more. Other people also noticed the odd lights. On the evening of the thirtieth, a young man named Carl Hart took five photographs of them in his backyard. The lights were visible only a few seconds each time Hart saw them, but they appeared to be at a high altitude. Ruppelt, who was later sent to investigate the incident, said of them, “In each photograph, the individual lights in the formation shifted position according to a definite pattern.” The photo labs at ATIC studying Hart’s photos commented:
[T]he two rows of spots behaved differently. One row shows only slight variation from a precise “V” formation throughout, whereas the other row appears to pass from above the first row, through it to a position below.
The objects in the photographs were never identified, and no evidence ever emerged to suggest that Hart’s photographs were hoaxes.
Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard tried to discredit the Lubbock Lights incident in Look and
While the Lubbock Lights bewildered the people of Texas, a low-flying V-shaped object appeared over Sandia AFB, a key atomic base in New Mexico. The object looked larger than a B-26, was silvery in color, had six or eight lights grouped in pairs, and flew at 400 mph. Like the lights in Lubbock, it was silent, but in this case reflected the city lights as it flew over. Ruppelt wondered whether the two seemingly distinct objects could be the same.76
As intriguing as the sightings themselves was Ruppelt’s description of who studied the reports. He noted that access to the information regarding the Lubbock Lights was restricted to two groups: (1) ATIC’s UFO investigative body and (2) another, unnamed group of people who, “due to their associations with the government, had complete access to our files.” These people
were scientists—rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence experts. They had banded together to study our UFO reports because they were convinced that some of the UFOs that were being reported were interplanetary spaceships, and the Lubbock series was one of these reports.77
Ruppelt could not have stated the matter any clearer. He described an extragovernmental group with preponderant influence within the government (how else could they have complete access to ATIC’s UFO files?) who believed that UFOs were extraterrestrial. Whatever the truth about the MJ-12 documents, Ruppelt described perfectly a group fitting the description of MJ- 12. Their evident goal was to manage the UFO problem, and they appeared to supersede the authority of ATIC.
THE REAL CONTROLLERS?
At Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, on the morning of September 10, a student radar operator, giving a demonstration for top military officials, caught an object “going faster than a jet.” His audience was incredulous. Twenty-five minutes later, however, a pilot and major aboard a T-33 jet trainer out of Dover AFB in Maryland saw a “dull, silver, disclike object” far below them. They obtained a radar fix on the object, which was traveling as fast as 900 mph. As the pilot descended rapidly to get a better view, the object hovered, then sped off and vanished out toward the sea.
A few hours later, Fort Monmouth Army Signal Center received an “almost frantic call” from headquarters to pick up a target high and to the north in the same area where the earlier UFO had been spotted. Another unidentified object was on the screen, traveling very slowly at the incredible altitude of eighteen miles. Visually, the object was discernible as a silver speck. The next morning, two radar sets picked up a target that performed nearly vertical climbs and dives, leveled off for a while, then performed more acrobatics.
