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by a young man named Carl Harton on Saturday, August 25, 1951. His series of pictures were widely published and became known as the Lubbock lights. Although the Air Force took the sightings and the pictures very seriously at the time, they later attempted to explain them away as merely being the reflection of the city lights on the bellies of birds flying overhead. Think about this one for a minute. Mr. Hart’s little Kodak must have had a most remarkable lens, for it is unlikely that such minor “teflections” would pick up on film at all. The state of Nebraska has a long and complicated history of UFO sightings. During the heavy but little-publicized flap of July-August 1966, some very definite patterns emerged. On Tuesday, July 5, 1966, at 10 P.M., a group of four witnesses reportedly viewed ‘‘a large octagon- shaped object with colored lights.... The lights dimmed and brightened, and the object swooped twice over a field and then went back into the air.”’ This took place about three miles northwest of Norfolk, Nebraska. On the ninth and tenth of July, there were sightings in North and South Dakota, the states north of Nebraska. On July 11 there were several sightings in Iowa, the state bordering Nebraska on the east. The South Dakota sightings took place in the southwest corner of the state, close to the northwest corner of the Nebraskan border. If we had been able to collect this data fast enough, we could have successfully predicted that a flap was due in Nebraska, and statistically the odds were that it would take place on a Wednesday night at 10 P.M. Shortly after 10 P.M. on Wednesday, July 13, 1966, a blazing object hurtled across the skies, heading southward from the northwest. About 10:10 P.M. scores of people in Muny Park, Cozad, Nebraska, saw ‘‘a very bright object with multicolored smaller bright stars trailing it.”’ If it had remained on that course, it would have angled straight across Kansas, and all of the later Kansan reports would have described a northwest to southeast course. However, a flood of reports from Kansas, including sightings by policemen, attorneys and many others, described the “meteor” as passing from northwest to northeast. This meant it had to be skirting the Nebraska-Kansas border. There was a particularly heavy concentration of reports from Central Nebraska from small communities such as Scotia, Ord, Burwell, Com- stock, Arcadia and North Loup. All of these were consistent, describing the object as passing from southwest to southeast. Another cluster of 136 / Operation Trojan Horse The Great Circle Route