FT262

I  might as well admit up straight away that I love a good UFO. Having grown up with the likes of Brad Steiger, Arthur Shuttlewood (and, indeed, Ed Straker), I’ve got a soft spot for flying saucers: from those animated by Ray Harryhausen in the 1955 film epic Earth vs the Flying Saucers to the more putatively authentic specimens that have allegedly offered psycho­therapy and free rides around the cosmos to willing recipients like George Adamski and Howard Menger.

But even those UFO reports that contain more gravitas find themselves consigned to being moot points somewhere between science, psychology, and the shadowy world of variant paradigms.

It is in the attempt to rationalise and compartmentalise the UFO phenomenon that we see the sceptical fraternity at its most contentious, throwing up all sorts of theories and ostensibly scient­ific ‘facts’ to explain away the bizarre things reported by frequently honest witnesses; some of these ‘explanations’ being at least as outlandish as the poss­ibility of extraterrestrial visitors. I’m certainly not a ‘True Believer’ myself, but perhaps a tolerant UFO agnostic.

I’m sure that most FT readers have at least a nodding acquaintance with  the Lubbock Lights, the anomalous form­ation of glowing objects that buzzed around the skies of Lubbock, Texas, in 1951. They were first sighted on 25 August that year by three professors from Texas Technical College: Dr WI Robinson; Dr AG Oberg and Dr WL Ducker, who reported a group of 20–30 lights flying in formation at great speed over the garden in which they were sitting. Reportedly clearing the sky “in seconds”, the lights were immediately followed up by a second ‘wave’ performing the same manœuvre.

This incident was duly reported in the local newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, precipitating not only great interest but additional reports of sightings from three women, pro­fessor of German Dr Carl Hemminger, and the head of the college journals department.

On 5 September, the three pro­fessors who reported the original sighting were witnesses once again to the strange lights, but were this time in the company of two more people, one of whom, Prof. Grayson Mead, described seeing approximately 15 greenish-blue lights that were circular in shape and travelling at a velocity of 600mph.

Things really became interesting on the evening of 30 August, when student Carl Hart Jr saw the lights fly past his bedroom window. Running into his garden with his 35mm Kodak camera, Hart was amazed to see the lights obligingly zooming past again, and rapidly snapped five shots of the mysterious objects. These images became the most compelling – and controversial – evidence in the case, appearing in newspapers across the US and becoming the subject of a Life magazine spread. Supposedly comprehensive analysis of the pictures concluded that it was impossible to identify them as being either genuine or hoaxes.

In September, Air Force Project Blue Book, the ‘official’ government body set up to investigate (or debunk) flying saucer reports, deployed Blue Book supervisor Lieutenant Edward J Ruppelt to investigate the Lubbock sightings. After examining all aspects of the matter, Ruppelt determined that the ‘Lubbock Lights’ were in fact birds – plovers, to be precise – that, in their annual migratory flight paths, were reflecting the glow from the new vapour street lamps that had been recently installed.

There was actually some evidence to support this theory in the report by local farmer TE Snider, who described what first appeared to be strange lights flying over a drive-in theatre, but which, on closer inspection, were revealed as birds reflecting the glow from the projection screen.

This only served to compound the confusion, but did not shake the various professors’ original contention as to what they had seen; in particular, Prof. Grayson Mead attacked the ‘bird’ hypothesis, stating that not only was the formation of the lights far too ‘disciplined’, but that birds – at least as far as he was aware – could not negotiate commercial air space at speeds of 600mph.

I first read about the Lubbock lights when I was about 12, and ever since I’d thought the suggestion that light could somehow reflect off the bodies of birds in such a way as to create the illusion of a fleet of alien spacecraft was completely nonsensical.

Or at least, that’s what I’d thought until now.

My usual ‘trade’ is in special effects – stop-motion animation, dinosaurs, zombies and all forms of associated weirdness – and I do much of this work from home, often working into the night on various projects. One late-summer evening about three years ago, I was working on a speculative horror movie ‘concept’, building some props and assorted paraphernalia. I had become completely absorbed in my work, not realising that the hours were rapidly passing, and was surprised to see the first pale light of dawn illumin­ating my garden. For some reason, I felt compelled to open my back door and view the sunrise.

The sky to the west was still in comparative darkness, and while I was looking in that general direction, there appeared, as if on cue, a flock of 10–15 geese flying just above rooftop height, heading east toward the rising Sun.

I immediately knew that something was wrong, but for a moment, I just couldn’t take in what I was seeing. I then realised that the geese were somehow reflecting the sunlight from their breasts with a brilliant, yellowy-white glow. The effect was so intense, that it was almost as if the geese had small lanterns hung around their necks. The best way to describe the spectacle would be to say that the birds seemed to be enveloped by some kind of iridescent fire.

They continued to fly right over the end of my garden, their breasts almost blindingly bright, and flew off towards the rapidly brightening sky, where the Sun was now almost above the distant rooftops.

What happened next completely amazed me. As the geese flew off so far into the distance that their wings and bodies were no longer discernable, the ‘glow’, far from diminishing in intensity, actually seemed to increase in strength – presumably because the geese were now fully exposed to the sunlight – creating the illusion of a loose formation of incandescent balls of light speeding off towards the horizon.

It was beautiful to watch; in fact, it was like witnessing a ‘real’ special effect, and even though I was fully aware of the ‘origin’ of this miracle, its unearthly quality made me feel as if I had been made privy to some heretofore-secret aspect of nature.

I quickly realised that if I had opened my back door 10 seconds later, and only glimpsed the lights speeding away, I would never have been convinced in a million years that what I had seen was something as mundane as a flock of geese.

That’s not to say, however, that I would have automatically jumped to the conclusion that I was witnessing the arrival of a detachment of inter­stellar travellers, but the ‘otherworldly’ aspect of the spectacle would surely have inspired me to give this particular option at least something approaching the benefit of the doubt. FT readers will no doubt be aware that birds – spec­ifically pelicans – have been proposed as the real culprits behind Kenneth Arnold’s original “flying saucer” sighting. I’d never been entirely convinced by this argument, but it looked as if I was going to have to rethink my position in light of my own ‘sighting’. (See FT137:34–39; 260:75–76 for the “pelican” theory, a pelican sighting from shortly after Arnold’s report, and Arthur C Clarke’s seagull sighting in Brisbane, Queensland.)

Now I’m not an ornithologist by any stretch of the imagination, but I know a Canada goose when I see one, and a subsequent Google search confirmed the birds I had seen to be exactly that, complete with their distinctive black-and-white markings; but a determined web search turned up no information whatsoever regarding any zoological principle, through either evolution or natural select­ion, that would explain – or even acknowledge – the reflective quality of the birds’ feathers. In fact, apart from some material describing how some other species have plumage that can be seen in ultraviolet light, I drew a complete blank.

Using Photoshop, I’ve had a crack at recreating at least an approximat­ion of the images I saw, so as, I hope, to give an impression of just how weird the whole thing looked. I believe these pictures to be pretty accurate – as far as memory allows – and I took particular pains over the last shot of the ‘UFOs’ to try to give a sense of how closely they presented the appearance of ‘real’ flying saucers.

At this point, I’d like to take the opportunity to pour an exceedingly large cup of freezing cold water over the heads of those sceptics who are probably at this moment clapping their hands with glee at what they undoubtedly perceive as another sizable nail being bashed into the coffin of the UFO phenomenon. Because while what I saw unquestionably conjured up a very convincing image of unidentified flying objects, it’s important to realise that this amazing spectacle could only be experienced at either dawn or dusk, and with the birds flying towards the rising or setting sun. And then again, the percipient would have to be lucky – or unlucky – enough to only see the birds at a distance, and so not recognise them for what they really were. UFO sightings that take place in the daytime or at night could not be explained away by what I saw.

For what it’s worth, I can’t believe that the Lubbock Lights were a bunch of plovers, reflecting the light from vapour street lamps either. The photographs, if authentic, show objects that are far too regular and evenly-spaced for the more random patterns of bird flight, and surely someone would have seen the plovers – if that’s what they were – breaking formation somewhere along their ‘flight path’.

Whatever UFOs turn out to be in the final analysis – alien or inter-dimensional visitors, ball-lightning, unexplained aerial phenomena, government black projects or swamp gas – conjecture as to their true identity undoubtedly serves to teach us as much about ourselves and our personal preconceptions as it does about the mysteries of the Universe at large.

But birds can clearly – in the correct circumstances – pull off a very credible impression of a ‘fleet’ of UFOs. And while I’m willing to accept that there may still be some inexplic­able things ‘out there’, I’d suggest that sometimes we need to look no further than the incredible natural phenomena of our own world for experiences quite as fantastic as any that might come from a million light years distant.