Before Buddy Holly put Lubbock on the map, the Lubbock Lights gave this Panhandle town national fame. On an August night in 1951, several college professors sitting outside on a porch saw a formation of blue lights fly quickly overhead. They waited to see if the lights would return, and later that evening, they observed the lights again. That same night, a Lubbock woman also spotted the blue lights as she was taking her laundry off a clothesline. The lights, she later told Air Force investigators, framed the tail end of an enormous, "winglike" craft. A few days earlier, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission saw the same type of aircraft in Albuquerque--a "wing-shaped" object with blue lights at its base. By the end of August, there was another sighting of the object in Matador, Texas, about seventy miles north of Lubbock, as well as photographs of the blue lights taken by Texas Tech freshman Carl Hart, Jr.

Before the lights disappeared two weeks later, dozens of people in North Texas reported seeing blue lights darting from one end of the horizon to the other. An investigation into the phenomenon for Project Bluebook--a 1950s and '60s Air Force study into the possible existence of UFOs--came up with two explanations for the sightings. One theory was that the lights were plovers, West Texas birds with shiny white breasts that could have reflected the city's glow as they flew overhead; another theory was that the lights were actually a result of Lubbock's newly-installed mercury-vapor street lamps that gave off a bluish haze. However, neither of these explanations accounted for the lights' immense speed or their sudden disappearance.

The Air Force ultimately categorized the Lubbock Lights sightings under the inconclusive heading "unidentified," making it one of the most famous--and widely witnessed--UFO incidents in history.