Welcome back! This week we're taking a look at the Air Force investigation of the UFO sightings in Levelland, Texas.
Missed Part 1? Don't worry! Click below to get started.
A little while after the events of November 2nd and 3rd, 1957, an Air Force Sergeant from Project Blue Book was sent to Levelland to interview the witnesses.
Project Blue Book
Project Blue Book was a top-secret Air Force program that ran from March 1952 to December 17, 1969, and was headquartered at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. It was initially led by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, and had two main goals: determining if UFOs were a national security threat, and analyzing UFO-related data.
Air Force Investigation of Levelland Sighting
The Levelland sightings were highly publicized across the nation, so an Air Force sergeant was sent to Levelland, and spent seven hours in the city interviewing the witnesses. Once he learned that thunderstorms had occurred in the area earlier that day, he quickly concluded it was a severe electrical storm that was the major cause for the sightings and reported auto failures. His best guess was either ball lightning or St. Elmo's Fire.
Ball Lightning
Ball lightning is a rare and unexplained phenomenon that has been reported for millennia. It's described as being glowing, spherical objects that can vary from the size of a pea to 6-9 feet in diameter. The reports usually coincide with thunderstorms, but last considerably longer than a flash of lightning.
Scientists have proposed tens, if not hundreds, of hypotheses on what causes ball lightning. They rely mostly on witness descriptions throughout the years, and these are extremely inconsistent. Due to a lack of reproducible data, it's impossible to determine its cause(s) or even existence.
St. Elmo's Fire
St. Elmo's fire is a much more explained occurrence when compared to ball lightning. It's been seen by Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin, and Nikola Tesla actually created it while testing a Tesla coil in Colorado Springs. It was even seen along the back of the Hindenburg a minute before it crashed in 1937, and on the Bockscar airplane which dropped a Fat Man nuclear weapon on Nagasaki, Japan at the end of WWII.
It's named after St. Erasmus of Formia (St. Elmo), the patron saint of sailors. The phenomena used to appear regularly on ships, and seemed to warn of a lightning strike. Sailors sometimes considered it to be a good omen — St. Elmo looking out for them.
There is a lot of scientific words used to explain it (if you want to learn more, you can Google "corona discharge"), but it essentially involves a gap in electrical charge similar to a lightning bolt. Lightning is the movement of electricity from a charged cloud to the ground, while St. Elmo's fire is more like a spark of electrons into the air.
