The Saturday night of August 25, 1951, was uncomfortably hot in the Southwest, and many persons spent the evening in the relative coolness out of doors. In the town of Lubbock, a professor of geology was sitting in his yard with two guests, fellow members of the faculty, discussing micrometeorites and counting meteors, which for several nights had been more numerous than usual. The sky was clear and cloudless and seeing conditions were ideal. About 9:20 the men noticed a group of fifteen to twenty lights passing silently overhead, going from north to south. They were obviously not meteors or planes, but disappeared too quickly to be identified. About an hour later a second group of lights appeared, forming a rough semicircle or crescent like a string of beads. Shortly before midnight a third group soared overhead in a random pattern (see Figure 11). [Illustration: _Figure 11._ Schematic sketch of lights observed by the professors at Lubbock, Texas. Left, pattern in the first and third sightings; right, pattern in the second sighting.] Trying to account for the phenomenon, the men agreed that all three flights had appeared suddenly, not gradually, in about the same part of the sky. Only the second had shown any sort of pattern, all had moved silently from north to south, their luminosity was not constant but had varied in intensity, and all had disappeared suddenly, not gradually, at about the same point in the sky. The men did not agree on the color, which they described as yellowish to white, with a soft glow. The lights had passed too swiftly for the men to locate them in relation to specific stars and there were no clouds in the sky; thus they had no known reference points by which to judge altitude, distance, or size. Since the lights had apparently moved over about 30 degrees of sky in one second, however, and the observers estimated the altitude as 5000 to 50,000 feet, the unknowns must have had an enormous size and an incredible speed of from 1800 to 18,000 miles an hour--typical flying saucers. Understandably curious, the host telephoned the managing editor of the local newspaper, the Lubbock _Evening Avalanche_, hoping that a printed account would elicit more information from other persons who had noticed the mysterious lights. The report appeared in the Sunday paper, August 26, but in the days that followed, no reader responded.