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On February 1, 1993, I had the opportunity to interview Carl Hart about the photographs. What follows is that interview. (For those interested in more about the Lubbock Lights, I suggest a look at my 1997 book, Conspiracy of Silence.) I offer the notes of the interview without commentary (well, not much).

After learning that the man I was talking with had taken the famous pictures, I asked, “Were you looking for the lights when you saw them?”

Carl Hart, Jr. in his home in Lubbock in 1951

He said, “Oh, no. Of course this was summer time and very hot. We didn’t have anything like central air conditioning. I slept with the windows open and I liked to sleep with my head stuck out the window and there they were.”

“You saw them fly over one time?”

“Oh, I think if I remember there were like three formations… of course they had been in the news here for a week or two before I happened to see them and they usually showed up in several flights when they would so… when I saw them I went on outside with my camera…”

“Did you get a feel for the size of the objects or how high above you they were?”

“Not really… the only thing I saw was lights. Wasn’t any other objects associated with them. Wasn’t any noise…”

“Now you were questioned quite closely by the Air Force…”

“The Air Force and everybody else.”

“Did the Air Force give you a final conclusion of what they thought you had photographed?”

“No, no they didn’t. I never did hear an official version. I heard some unofficial things that came out later… about how they thought I had faked them somehow or another.” (Attempts to duplicate the pictures by a professional photographer failed… and because of that, this part of the mystery remains unsolved.)

“Of course you hadn’t faked them…”

“No.”

“You have no idea what they were?”

“I really don’t. I’m not even sure who it was. There was someone tried to duplicate the light in a laboratory by reflecting light off a pan of water where they could cause a ripple run down the water and they could cause them to move and his theory was that it was a cold air inversion and that it had waves in it like the ocean and the sensation of them moving across the sky so I don’t know if that’s what happened or not.” (This was Dr. Donald Menzel whose results were published in 1952. Later Menzel decided, without evidence, that Hart had faked the pictures. Menzel, it seems, could not admit that some aspects of the UFO phenomenon were inexplicable.)

Another of the photos taken by Carl Hart, Jr. Contrary to some reports, the objects in the photographs have never been identified.

“You really have no clue about what you saw…”

“I really don’t. Nothing’s ever come forward to explain those and there wasn’t anything for me to judge them by other than just the lights on the bottom of just one object or group of individual lights… They were lights either on something or individually.”

Did you know the professors who had seen the things the first night?”

“Later on I did. I didn’t know them at the time.”

“Were they aware you had taken the pictures?”

“Oh, yeah. I think there were some of the ones felt like I had stolen their glory… They weren’t too receptive of what I had done as best I could recall.”

“Have you made any money off this thing?”

“I might have made three or four hundred dollars total over the years,” he said.

“The pictures appear in books and magazines all the time.”

“I wasn’t aware enough of what was going on to copyright them. If anyone paid my anything it was to save themselves from possible legal problems later on… for several years people would ask before they would use them… My advice from a friend and professional journalist at the time was that if you copyright them somebody’s going to think you faked tem and are trying to make money out of them”

Hart did tell me that he doesn’t particularly disbelieve in flying saucers. He said, “I’m kind of open minded on that. If one would show up some place else here, I think I’d accept.”

I asked him one last time if he knew what he had photographed.

“I really don’t.”

(I have found that those faking UFO pictures eventually come clean, admitting the hoax, sometimes decades later. With Hart, although no one would really care at this late date if he had faked them or not, he maintained he didn’t know what he had photographed that night. Because of that, the photographic part of the Lubbock Lights remains unsolved.)

Fay Clark’s UFO Photograph

A number of years ago, more than I like to think about, I used to visit newspaper morgues and ask about UFO stories. Sometimes I got lucky and found information on cases that hadn’t been reported outside the local area. In Cedar Rapids I was given a photograph of two objects (seen at the left) as they flew over town. I deduced the date as late August or early September based on evidence in the picture and was told that it had been taken by Fay Clark, one time the mayor of little Hiawatha, Iowa.

Later I learned that the picture (seen here) had been taken on September 3, 1955, and was pleased that I had figured the time of year properly. I learned that Sam Stochl had been commissioned by the mayor, Clark, to take aerial photographs of Hiawatha but he hadn’t seen the objects that appeared in the picture. Clark said that “knowing the airplane was flying at 1,200 feet… we can triangulate the objects as approximately 33 feet in diameter… at an altitude of 800 feet.”

All well and good, but the picture always struck me as looking as if the objects had been drawn on the photographic paper and then the picture printed. You might remember how you could put designs on Easter eggs using wax to protect the shell from the dye. I always thought the objects had that sort of a quality too them. I especially thought this after learning that no one had seen the objects in broad daylight.

Now I learn a little more about Fay Clark. He is credited with founding Hiawatha. He was a rock hound, a flying saucer enthusiast and had an interest in photography. He wrote about book in 1958, Beyond the Light, about astral projection and parapsychology.

Given this information, especially about his interests in UFOs and photography, given the look of the photograph, and given that the actual photographer, Sam Stochl didn’t see the objects, I think we can conclude that Clark created the photograph. It was undoubtedly meant as a local oddity and nothing more, though it has appeared in one book published for a national audience some years later.

This is just another in a long list of UFO photographs that doesn’t deserve much more than a casual glance. And even if we called the photograph authentic (meaning of real UFOs) there isn’t much more we can do. There are no eyewitnesses and the evidence offered is of little value without additional information. It is an oddity, it is interesting, and it does nothing to increase our knowledge.

Trindade UFO Photographs

(Note: When people suggest there is no evidence of alien visitation, one of the first things pointed to are the photographs taken in 1958. Skeptics have said that only the photographer saw the object, that he was a note “trick” photographer, and that these pictures have been proven to be a hoax. Now, thanks to friends in Brazil, we have a witness who was there and who can shed some light on the topic. My thanks to A. J. Gevaerd, Alexandre de Carvalho Borges and Eduardo Rado for their work and the permission to reprint the article.)