Like most old-time residents of the area, the rancher was accustomed to the yearly exodus of migratory fowl. Traveling at night in groups of six to twenty, they usually flew at 1000 feet or lower at a maximum speed of about fifty miles an hour in the weeks from late August to mid-November. The rancher had read about the professors’ sighting, which sounded exactly like his own. It would have baffled him, too, he said, if he had not gotten a good look when the third flight circled the house and if he had not happened to hear the single call. Another resident reported, much later, that he had often seen such lights and recognized them as birds. One night he had noticed “a formation of ducks pass over so low that you could actually see the whole bodies with their shiny white undersides glowing.” At other times he had seen ducks flying at low altitudes with only the undersides glowing and creating an illusion of objects moving very fast at a high altitude[VI-9]. In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the original objects had been birds, probably plover, reflecting the city’s lights, Captain Ruppelt chose to regard them as mysterious and listed the professors’ sighting as an Unknown. Several years later he wrote that a natural explanation did exist but, for some reason, he had promised not to divulge it[VI-7, p. 150]. Still later, he asserted without amplification that the lights had been night-flying moths reflecting the bluish green of mercury-vapor street lights[VI-10, p. 276]--a surprising anticlimax, in view of his earlier secrecy. In a reanalysis of the facts made in 1959, Major (now Lieutenant Colonel) R. J. Friend of ATIC and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, science consultant, determined beyond doubt that the objects had been plover. _The Lubbock Pictures_ The problem of the photographs remained. In Dayton, Air Force experts studied the four available negatives. The photographer had used a Kodak 35-mm. camera, lens at 3.5, Plus-X film, and an exposure time of 1/10 second. The negatives were badly scratched and dirty from much handling. According to the photographer’s story, each flight of unknowns had moved from horizon to horizon in four to five seconds and had passed directly overhead; he had “panned” his camera with the movement of the objects and had managed to snap two pictures during one flight and three during the next.