Then on Friday August 31, five days after the original story had appeared and apparently died, it suddenly came to life. A college freshman who occasionally sold news photographs to the Lubbock paper brought in five pictures of a group of mysterious lights he had photographed the night before. He had been lying in bed next to an open window, he explained, and shortly before midnight he had observed a formation of brilliant lights moving rapidly across the sky. Grabbing his camera, a Kodak 35-mm., he had rushed out into the yard and, after a brief wait, had been able to photograph two similar flights that raced overhead a few minutes apart. Each light had been brighter than Venus, they had maintained a perfect V formation, and had sped from horizon to horizon in a mere four or five seconds. Yet this amazing apparition had apparently gone unnoticed by all except the lucky amateur. Fearing a hoax, both the editor and the staff photographer hesitated but, since the negatives displayed no obvious evidence of fraud, they finally bought and printed the pictures and distributed them over the country through the United Press. People all over the nation could now argue the question: What were the Lubbock lights? A few said flying saucers. Many Texans said ducks, plover, or other migratory fowl. But the things in the pictures didn’t look like birds; and if they weren’t birds, what were they? Some persons bluntly called them a hoax. Impelled perhaps by the growing publicity, the staff photographer of the _Evening Avalanche_ several times tried to duplicate the pictures by photographing flights of birds at night. He allowed himself better equipment--a Speedgraphic camera loaded with a tungsten ASA 80 film, and a GE no. 22 flashbulb in a concentrating reflector. Opening the camera to f 4.7 at 1/10 second, he went up to the roof of the newspaper building to try his luck. After a brief wait he was able to photograph a flock of birds that appeared high overhead, reflecting the mercury-vapor lights of the street, flying noiselessly in a “ragged” V formation, but the image on the negative proved too faint for use. The next night he tried again, using a Kodak Reflex set at f 3.5, Super XX film, at 1/10 second, plus the flashbulb and concentrating reflector. The birds appeared on schedule, but again the images proved too faint for use. The experimenter concluded, probably correctly, that the amateur must have photographed something much brighter than birds.