By Charles Lear
In November of 1957, there was a major flying saucer flap that began with a case that remains a favorite among UFOlogists. Starting on the night of November 2, and going into the early morning hours of November 3, there were a series of extraordinary encounters in and around the small farming community of Levelland, Texas. Besides the quantity and quality of the witnesses, there were reports from other areas in the Southwest that supported the Levelland accounts. The Air Force conducted an investigation that was cursory at best and offered explanations that could have been pulled out of a hat. The National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena had their own man on the case. That he might have been biased towards an unearthly explanation for the reports is an understatement. Whether one was biased or not, based on the witness reports, what was seen was not easily explainable in terms of natural phenomena or the technology of the day.
November in Levelland was a peak period for the cotton harvest and the work was round-the-clock. For this reason, there were many people awake during the night and early morning hours of the dates under discussion. Patrolman Abraham John Fowler was working the evening shift at the Levelland Police Department when the first of what would be a series of unusual calls came in. Just before 11:00 p.m., a farm worker, Pedro Saucedo, called to report a very strange encounter that left him and his co-worker, Joe Salaz, shaken and mystified. According to Saucedo, they were in his pickup truck, on their way to a farm ten miles northwest of Levelland. At 10:30 p.m., they turned off Route 116 (now Route 114) four miles west of Levelland, onto a side road. Off to their right, in a field, they saw a bright blue flash, which drew their attention. The source of the light was a cigar or torpedo-shaped object around 200 feet long. As they watched, the object, glowing blue-green, lifted up and came towards the truck. As it did so, its color changed to bright yellow-white. As it passed over the truck at high speed, the engine stalled and the headlights went out. Saucedo, afraid that it would hit the truck, jumped out and hit the dirt. Salaz remained inside and, fortunately for him, there was no collision. The object gave off a roaring sound, its color changed to red, and air rushed in behind it as it flew off, leaving the truck rocking. Saucedo described feeling an intense heat from the object and estimated that it traveled at 600 to 800 mph to the east. As the object moved off, the truck engine started back up on its own and the lights came back on. Saucedo then drove to the town of Whiteface, ten miles away, which was the location of the nearest payphone.
Patrolman Fowler assumed that Saucedo was either drunk or making a prank call and dismissed his report. Then he received another call from James Wheeler of nearby Whitharral, Texas. Wheeler reported that he was on Route 116 on the east side of Levelland when he came upon an object sitting on the road in front of him. He described it as being egg-shaped, over 200 feet long and that it gave off a neon glow. As he got close, his engine and headlights both shut off. Wheeler got out of his car and walked towards the object. It lifted up suddenly to a height of 200 feet, its glow faded out and it then moved off. After it was gone, Wheeler was able to restart the car (or it started up on its own) and the headlights were, again, operational.
Another call came in a little after midnight from Jose Alverez, also of Whitharral. Alverez had come upon a glowing object sitting on the road at around 11:00 p.m. As with the others, his engine and headlights went off when approaching the object, and came back on when the object departed.
Several more callers described similar encounters and Fowler began to take what they were telling him seriously. He contacted the Texas State Highway Patrol, informed them of the reports and suggested they be on the lookout. He contacted Sheriff Weir Sam Clem and Deputy Pat Ira McCulloch of the Hockley County Sheriff’s Department. He also called the Lubbock, Texas Police Department. Thinking that airplanes might have been involved, Fowler called Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, and the Civil Aeronautics Administration. He was told by both that there were no planes in the area. After all the calls were made, there were 14 police cruisers from various police departments along with Major Daniel R. Kester from Reese AFB, all on the lookout for mysterious objects. Kester spoke with members of law enforcement, collected details of the reports and visited the sites where the encounters occurred. After gathering what he felt was enough information, Kester wrote up the original report that initiated the investigation by the Air Force’s Project Blue Book.
Sheriff Clem and Deputy McCulloch both became witnesses when they happened upon an oval-shaped light sitting on the road. Clem said that it lit up the entire road in front of them. Other officers reported distant flashes of light and Levelland Fire Chief Ray Jones, saw lights as his car engine sputtered and his headlights flickered.
Throughout the morning of November 3 and into the night of November 6, there were many more reports from the surrounding areas of Texas and New Mexico that involved lights, egg-shaped objects and stalled cars. Reporters came into Levelland on November 3 and several witnesses, including Sheriff Clem, spoke to them about their encounters. The stories were written up for the local papers and sent out over the Associated Press and United Press wire. The news quickly went national.
Because of all the news coverage, the Air Force was compelled to send a Project Blue Book investigator to Levelland. On November 5, Staff Sergeant Norman P. Barth arrived at the Hockley County Sheriff’s Office. He talked to Clem and interviewed three witnesses including Saucedo and Wheeler. He then spent three hours in Levelland and three hours in Lubbock. He gathered some weather information and then left to write up his report.
This case had generated far too much press for the Air Force’s comfort and, in keeping with the recommendations of the Robertson Panel, it needed to be explained away. In the case file, mentions of mist, rain and drizzle are circled and noted. They were looking to blame everything on the weather and grabbed onto anything that would support that. Flashing neon lights and the description of an object giving off a sound like thunder are noted to be “typical lightning characteristics.” After exploring various “possibilities” including burning gas fires from nearby oil fields and St. Elmo’s Fire, the conclusion was that ball lightning was the cause of all the fuss. It’s an odd conclusion to have settled on because, at that time, most scientists believed in ball lightning about as much as they believed in spaceships.
A man who did believe in spaceships was, James A. Lee, a N.I.C.A.P. investigator who was on the scene on November 3. Lee had his own ideas about the nature of the universe due to decades of studying all sorts of esoteric books. He believed that space was made up of ether, that the vortex of the ethers held all things on Earth, as opposed to gravity, and that tornadoes were caused by leftover energy from God’s creation of the Earth.
Lee was a shortwave radio enthusiast and had developed a network of operators throughout the Southwest. Lee and his group took part in radio discussions every Monday at 9:00 p.m. They talked about science, space and UFOs and adopted the name, “The Interplanetary Space Patrol.” Lee had been in the news that year prior to the events at Levelland. He was reported to have patrolled the area around George Van Tassel’s Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention at Giant Rock in California in his 1949 Cadillac. He called the car his “Space Wagon” and it was equipped with an “infrared beam detector” designed to ferret out any outer space based spies who might have been looking in on the convention.
After a careful investigation at Levelland, that included taped interviews of witnesses (lost to history at present) his well-thought out conclusion was that people had seen a spaceship. In the November 6 edition of The Abilene Reporter-News, an article notes Lee’s speculation that the spaceship had been drawn there because of a lecture on UFOs he was scheduled to give that Sunday in Brownfield, 29 miles south of Levelland. It was, perhaps, as reasonable an explanation as ball lightning.