UFO sighting that terrified a city

Grainy photos claim to show the Lubbock Lights. Photo / Getty Images

In August 1951 a series of unusual lights appeared in the night sky over a Texas city for weeks before disappearing and they have never been seen again.

The unexplainable and erratic nature of the bright beams terrified the residents and grainy images of the event still capture the attention of conspiracy theorists today.

The lights were first sighted on August 25 in Lubbock by a group of scientists that were hanging out in a colleagues backyard one evening, reports news.com.au.

At around 9.20pm the group all witnessed something that they couldn't explain: 15 to 30 bright blueish-green lights appeared in the sky and silently whizzed overhead in a V-formation.

Grainy photos claim to show the Lubbock Lights. Photo / Getty Images

They disappeared just as quickly as they had come but appeared again an hour later, this time in a more scattered shape.

Over the next few weeks hundreds of other residents would report seeing the mass of lights flying silently and unbelievably fast across the sky.

A casebook by US Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, titled The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, detailed a number of reports from eyewitnesses.

A retired rancher described how terrified his wife was after seeing the objects.

"(It was) just after dark, his wife had gone outdoors to take some sheets off the clothesline. He was inside the house reading the paper," Mr Ruppelt describes in the book.

"Suddenly his wife had rushed into the house …'as white as the sheets she was carrying'. The reason his wife was so upset was that she had seen a large object glide swiftly and silently over the house."

The wife described it as "an aeroplane without a body" that had wings covered in glowing blue lights.

After more reports came flooding, some of the locals decided it was time to investigate what these lights actually were.

The group of professors that first saw the lights started an informal investigation, in which they measured the speed and angles of the lights and fact checked sightings.

They noted that the UFOs always travelled from north to south.

The events started to gain wider attention after a university student managed to snap a picture of the lights, which were widely published in newspapers and magazines.

The pictures caused a major debate, with people claiming they were a hoax while residents said it was exactly like the objects they had been seeing.

SO WHAT WAS IT?

Multiple explanations have been offered up over the years by scholars and authorities, but the majority of witnesses had a hard time believing them.

The Air Force claimed the lights were nothing more than the underside of a plane and another investigation concluded it was actually caused by birds reflecting the light from Lubbock's new street lamps.

But the locals dismissed these suggestions, insisting the objects were moving too fast to be bird or planes.

To this day there are those that believe Lubbock was visited by UFOs, with some witnesses firmly believing that what they saw over those few weeks in 1951 was not from this world.