The photographs, which provided a form of physical evidence, were carefully analyzed. The validity of the photographs rested on the shoulders of a nineteen-year-old photographer. To be fair, it must be pointed out that the vast majority of teenage males who have submitted UFO pictures to the Air Force or the media have faked them. In this case, however, there is absolutely no evidence that a hoax was involved. Even more than forty years after the event, Carl Hart, Jr. maintained he doesn't know what he photographed.
In the end, however, Air Force investigators accepted the explanation as birds. While it is clear that Joe Bryant's sighting is explainable as birds, there is no reason to extrapolate from it. There is no evidence that what the college professors saw were birds. And certainly the photographs don't show birds. In other words, the Air Force investigators were able to label the case but were not able to solve it. A more honest answer is that the Lubbock Lights are unidentified.
During the Washington Nationals, there were highly trained professionals making the sightings. The men were trained in the use of radar, knew what weather related propagation looked liked, and believed they were seeing something real. When airline pilots were called and asked to spot the objects, they saw lights where the radar said they should be.
More importantly, when jet interceptors arrived on the scene, the UFOs seemed to react to them, something that weather related phenomena would not do. In one case, as the jets arrived, all the UFOs disappeared. When the jets departed the area, the UFOs returned. That suggests something other than weather.
On the second night the Pentagon liaison officer for Project Blue Book, Dewey Fournet was present. Al Chop, the Pentagon spokesman for Project Blue Book, was present. Both saw the blips on the radar screens. Both watched the attempted intercepts. Both knew that what was happening had nothing to do with weather or temperature inversions.
Yet forty-eight hours later, as General Samford briefed reporters, neither man was at the press conference. Instead Samford relied on an Air Force captain, an expert on radar, who had not been on the scene during the sightings. His explanations sounded good, he was an expert, but he had not been there during the sightings so he didn't know.
It is Ed Ruppelt's discussion of the case that provides us with the best clues. Ruppelt candidly wrote that some of the Air Force personnel, both officers and enlisted men, were pressured to alter their testimonies. What had been seemingly inexplicable sightings of objects in the sky, became nothing more than stars. This implies that even in the summer of 1952, as some officers tried to conduct real investigations, others were attempting to suppress the data. There would be no other reason to pressure witnesses to change their stories.
By 1962, when the Las Vegas UFO explosion took place, all attempts at independent and objective investigation ceased. We've seen in other cases how the Air Force investigators split sightings into many components and then dealt with them individually. This is an old military tactic. Split the enemy forces and then attack them in detail. It means that it is easier to defeat a company than it is a regiment. If you can take on the regiment a company at a time, you can defeat it a company at a time.
If we can split the UFO sightings into their components, we can explain each of the components. The explanation of meteor is ridiculous when the whole of the Eureka-Las Vegas case is examined. However, a meteor can explain the Eureka end of it if there is no linkage to the Las Vegas sighting. A meteor becomes a plausible explanation.
And the Las Vegas end is "explained" as insufficient data. Just what does that mean? Well, it means they found no explanation for it, but they were able to label it. And, what additional information did they need? They had a time, a date, a location, and very precise information about the directions and altitudes. They even had a number of eyewitnesses had anyone at Project Blue Book or Nellis Air Force Base bothered to read the newspaper. Of course, had they done that, they would have had additional and unanswerable questions with which to deal.
These three cases all have a single common denominator and that is the attempt to find an explanation, any explanation. Each was labeled with an explanation that doesn't stand up to any sort of objective scrutiny. The holes for the explanations are many. But it does reveal the nature of the investigation, even when there were attempts to objectively investigate. It demonstrates that the real motivation wasn't to find the truth but the label the cases. How else to explain what happened in these instances? How else to explain solutions that make no sense when the evidence, available to the investigators is examined?
Yes, I spoke to people thirty and forty years after the fact. Yes, in that time memories can change and confabulation is a real consideration. But I also had access to the files prepared when the events were fresh in the minds of the witnesses, and I could see if confabulation had taken place. I could see if stories had changed, been altered over time or had been embellished.
And events, especially frightening events, stand out in the mind. Bob Robinson talking of the craft flashing overhead is interesting, but the sputtering of the truck engine and the dimming of the lights is even more so. Raymond Jackson's comments about the lights in the doctor's office are interesting as well. Both suggest that the UFO was interacting with the environment under it and photoelectric cells on street lights had nothing to do with it.
These cases are illustrative. They show us what was going on at the official UFO project. They show us that objective investigation did not take place. They show us that there was a scramble for answers regardless of the facts in the case. And they show us that the high-ranking Air Force officers were not above applying pressure to people so that a solution would seem to be more likely.
There is one other thing that we can see here. As I conducted my investigations, sometimes as much as forty years after the sightings, I was able to find additional witnesses. I was able to interview men and women who had made sighting reports and to find additional witnesses. Even in the limited time that I had, on the limited budget I had, I could talk to many different people about the case. The question that springs to mind is why couldn't the Air Force investigators do that? They had access to the same information resources that I did. They could have used the telephone the way I did. And, in many cases they were on the scene with days or weeks of the sightings, yet failed to find what I did. Doesn't that really speak volumes about the way the investigation was conducted? Doesn't that suggest that truth was not the motivation? Doesn't that suggest, just as we have all along, that Air Force and official investigators were doing something other than searching for the truth?
Appendix B: The Blue Book Unidentifieds
In 1975 I learned, wholly by accident, that the Project Blue Book files had been declassified and were open for public review. This was back when the files were housed at Maxwell Air Force Base and before they had been microfilmed. Robert Charles Cornett and I spent days in the files, going through the index, writing down all the unidentified cases, many of the photo and physical evidence cases, and any others that caught our attention. We included the names of the witnesses, still much in evidence in those files.
Sometime later, the files were moved to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and were microfilmed. Before the microfilming was done, a number of Air Force officers read each file, attempting to black out the names of all the witnesses. When the files were re-released to the public and made available on microfilm, it seemed that one of the most critical pieces of evidence had been removed.