The Levelland Sightings Of 1957 by Antonio Rullán: Literature Survey

Commentary and Analysis from Pro-UFO Authors

Many UFO researchers have written about the Levelland UFO sightings in one way or another. Most authors write about the standard claim: that 7 witnesses had their automobiles’ engines and headlights shut off by a UFO within a 2.5 hour period and within a small area surrounding Levelland. Each author gives his reason for the importance and merits of the Levelland case. The section below summarizes what made this case so popular among UFO researchers.

According to Donald Keyhoe, Director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) from 1957 to 1969, the reason this case became so popular was that too many newspapers were taking the sighting reports seriously. The press took the sightings seriously because five Texas law officers backed the story. Keyhoe believed that had it been an isolated case, the press would have killed it with ridicule. The press did not kill the story because there were too many trained observers on record. Keyhoe, however, did not give this case any exalted importance. He did not believe it was the beginning of the 1957 UFO wave but the continuation of it. Keyhoe thought the evidence put forward by NICAP was sufficient to conclude that the UFO at Levelland was an extraterrestrial craft. Overall, Keyhoe supported this case as evidence for the extraterrestrial hypothesis because there were multiple independent witnesses, because the claims were backed up by law officers, and because of the lack of a reasonable explanation for the reported anomalous events.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astronomer and former Project Blue Book scientific consultant, thought the case was significant enough to include it in his book The UFO Experience as the top Close Encounter of the 2nd Kind (CEII) amongst 23 cases listed. Hynek developed a Strangeness-Probability Index for the cases he evaluated in order to determine their worthiness for study. The Levelland case had a Strangeness Index of 5 and a Probability Index of 8. This rating put it at the top of Hynek’s CEII list. Hynek’s definition of the Strangeness Index is the number of information bits a report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common sense terms. For example, in the Levelland case he found 5 items that he could not explain using common senses. Unfortunately, he did not list these items. We could guess at them based on Hynek’s list of items difficult to explain:

1. weird looking ball of light (BOL)

2. BOL stops car engine

3. BOL shuts off car headlights\ engine and headlights start fine when BOL leaves

4. BOL appears under intelligent control.

Hynek’s probability rating is a function of assessed credibility of the witnesses. He judges this by (1) internal consistency of the report, (2) consistency among several reports of same incident (3) manner in which report was made (4) conviction of reporter and (5) subtle judgement of “how it all hangs together”. Hynek gave the Levelland case a very high probability rating of eight out of ten. He gave such a high rating because of the multiple independent witnesses in this case. Hynek stated “that all seven cases of separate car disablement and subsequent rapid, automatic recovery after the passage of the strange illuminated craft, occurring within about two hours, could be attributed to coincidence is out of the statistical universe – if the reports are truly independent”.

As opposed to Keyhoe, Hynek did not conclude that this incident was an extraterrestrial craft. What Hynek concluded was that the Air Force ball lightning explanation for the cause of the sightings was not acceptable. Hynek did not believe the ball lighting explanation for two key reasons: (1) observers at the time of the incident did not report lightning but overcast and misty weather (2) there is no evidence that ball lightning can stop cars and put out headlights. These two points are very significant regardless of the number of witnesses who experience the phenomenon. For Hynek, however, the fact that 7 observers reported similar events, brought significant credibility to the observed claim. Hynek did not put a lot of weight on the weird light reports from the 5 law enforcement officers in Levelland because they did not experience the auto engine and light failure.

Dr. Jacques Vallee also wrote about the Levelland case in Anatomy of a Phenomenon. Vallee, however, did not analyze the case in detail nor gave it any special importance. For him, it was another case among the wave of sightings in 1957. He stated that the wave had been going on for a long time and did not start with Levelland or Sputnik II . It did not represent anything new to him, since he was very familiar with the UFO landing reports from France in 1954. Vallee, like Hynek, did not believe the ball lighting explanation for the case. Vallee wrote in 1965: “the official fairy tale concerning the Levelland case is that the sensational interpretation of the sightings by the press triggered the series of reports now known as the 1957 wave.” In Jan 16, 1964, Vallee and Hynek met with Bluebook Officers - Captain Hector Quintanilla and Sergeant Moody in Chicago to discuss the UFO Phenomenon. In that meeting, Captain Quintanilla and Sergeant Moody agreed that they could not explain the Levelland case. An interesting revelation given that Bluebook had explained the Levelland sightings seven years earlier as Ball Lightning.

Ronald Story also had a high regard for the Levelland case. He called the Levelland case one of the two best cases on record of electromagnetic effects caused by UFO’s. He included the case as one of the 10 most baffling cases on record in his book titled Sightings. Story agreed with Hynek in rejecting the ball lighting hypothesis as the explanation for the Levelland sightings. Story stated four reasons why the case was so extraordinary and had never been explained satisfactorily to him:

1. No evidence that ball lighting stops cars and put out headlights

2. Ball lighting preference for dirt roads and paved highways

3. Ball lightning size of 200 ft is not common

4. Six independent witnesses experienced something similar and extraordinary within a 10 mile radius of Levelland

Richard Hall included the Levelland case in his book the UFO Evidence as just one more case in the UFO wave of November 1957. The case was of importance to Hall because it was the first series of sightings to be widely publicized in November of 1957 and it had the most intensive single concentration of UFO sightings. In the book, Walter Webb gave a good summary of the events at Levelland in November 2-3, 1957. While no analysis of the case was provided in the book, Richard Hall and Walter Webb made several good points:
They wondered why should reddish elliptical UFOs, which cause cars to stall, suddenly be reported from one small Texas town.
They pointed out that the witnesses were going about their business when the UFOs intruded upon the scene. There was no evidence that the witnesses were searching the sky or otherwise expecting to see anything unusual. Their independent reports told a consistent story.

Dr. James E. McDonald was also fascinated by this case. McDonald added the Levelland case to his list of UFO Cases of Interest mainly because he had personally checked the case and saw in it characteristics of special interest. McDonald was very disappointed in the analysis of the case done by Dr. Menzel and the Air Force who explained away the Levelland sightings as ball lightning and wet ignitions.

McDonald checked the weather data for the night and locale in question. He studied the weather maps and rainfall data and concluded that a large, high-pressure area was moving southward over the Texas panhandle. He believed that these weather conditions were not conducive to lightning of any sort. He checked half a dozen stations in the vicinity and found that there was not even any rain falling during this period, nor had more than a small amount fallen hours earlier that day when a cold front passed through. McDonald concluded that the prevailing anticyclonic conditions in Levelland the night of November 2-3, 1957 almost categorically ruled out ball lightning . Thus, McDonald concluded that the Levelland case was not ball lightning and that it was still an unknown. The key reasons McDonald did not agree with the ball lightning explanation was:

1. He believed that ball lightning had to accompany a thunderstorm, but there was none reported the night in question

2. He believed that ball lightning seldom exceeds a few feet in diameter, but the description of the objects was about 200-ft.

McDonald certainly did not believe that ball lightning could form under fair-weather conditions (free of all thunderstorm activity). He claimed that via some elementary computations he could show how quantitatively absurd this claim was. Moreover, McDonald also did not like the wet ignition explanation for the failure of the car engines. He pointed out the fact that the engines could be re-started just as soon as the object darted off was entirely inconsistent with wet ignition idea.

The Levelland case was also written up in the American edition of Aime Michel’s Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery (Michel, 1958) by Alexander D. Mebane (member of the Civilian Saucer Intelligence group in New York). Mebane used four arguments to accept the Levelland sightings as flying saucers:

1. Used the analogy to the French sightings from the Fall of 1954

2. Disagreed with the Air Force explanation that rain and storms led to wet electrical circuits that shut the auto engines.

3. He wrote: “How the circuits happened to dry out instantly when the ball lightning had departed was not explained.”

4. Claimed that there were no thunderstorms in the area during the sightings. He quotes a Levelland weatherman statement in the Levelland Sun-News of November 5, 1957.

5. Complained about the Air Force investigation being too short

Of these four points only point #2 and #3 are valid and will be discussed further in this paper.

The Levelland case was also included in the 1981 CUFOS study on UFO reports involving vehicle interference (Rodeghier). Rodeghier evaluated 481 UFO reports, which involved vehicle interference. Of these 481 reports, eight came from the Levelland case. In the study, Rodeghier found 35 statistically significant correlations amongst observed properties of the electromagnetic (EM) UFO events. He grouped these highly correlated properties into three Nexus consisting of 3 to 4 properties each. In a nexus, the presence of any one characteristic implies that the likelihood of the other three occurring is increased.

Nexus I had the following positively correlated characteristics:

presence of light beam
control of the vehicle
physiological effect on witness
chasing of the vehicle

Nexus II had the following positively correlated characteristics:

metallic appearing UFO
UFO that lands
disc-shaped UFO
presence of sound

Nexus III had the following positively correlated characteristics:

movement in a straight trajectory
UFOs that appear as a light
size range under fifteen feet

Rodeghier concluded that UFO reports that fall within Nexus I and II do not represent some unknown natural phenomenon because in these groupings the UFO is described as metallic and behaves with intelligence. On the other hand, Rodeghier concluded that Nexus III contains characteristics, which appear to describe an undiscovered natural phenomenon. The relevance of Rodeghier’s work to the Levelland case is that the Levelland sightings do not fit in Nexus I or II (the Nexus groups that most likely describe non-natural phenomena). The Levelland sightings fit better under the Nexus III category because the Levelland UFOs moved in straight trajectories and they were described as balls of light. The only characteristic that does not fit with Nexus III is the size of the reported UFO (between 30 to 200 ft as opposed to Nexus III characteristic of less than 15 ft). The key point here is that the Levelland sightings do not fit into the EM UFO groupings that are unambiguously strange and unexplainable. The interpretation of the Levelland sightings is open to a possible natural phenomenon explanation.

In summary, most pro-UFO authors felt that the Levelland case deserved attention because of the multiple independent eyewitness testimony and the consistency of the anomalous claims. Moreover, most of the authors rejected the ball lightning hypothesis because the weather conditions and the object’s behavior, characteristics, and its effect on the automobiles did not match what was known about ball lightning. Thus, determining the accuracy of the witness testimony, understanding their claims and description of the object and its behavior, and determining the weather conditions are crucial to understanding this case.

Commentary and Analysis from Pro-Ball Lightning Authors

Dr. Donald H. Menzel (Harvard Astronomer and Director of the Harvard College Observatory) also wrote about the Levelland sightings in his book The World of Flying Saucers (Menzel, 1963). In the book, he retracts previous statements made to the press in 1957 when he stated that mirages were causing the sightings. He explains that he made these statements too quickly without having all the evidence at hand. His original statements to the press (back in Nov. 6, 1957) were:

“The whole thing amounts to another flying saucer scare. They are caused by a layer of heated air… acting as a lens and forming an image of objects as much as 40 to 50 miles way. They are nothing more than a mirage. They are prevalent just after nightfall as the heated air begins to cool off at the ground and they are common in the West where they have clear air.”

As for reports of auto engines stalling, Menzel said, “it would not be surprising that a nervous foot could stall an engine.”

Six years after this statement, in his 1963 book, Menzel fully supported the ball lightning explanation for the events of November 2 and 3 and rejected the mirage hypothesis. He states “in Levelland the night of Nov. 2, conditions were ideal for the formation of ball lightning. For several days the area had been experiencing freak weather and on the night in question had been visited by rain, thunderstorms and lightning.” He also states that the month of November 1957 proved to be the wettest ever recorded in West Texas. However, Menzel does not include the sources or references for his weather information.

Menzel gives three possible reasons for why the automobiles’ engine died during the ball lightning sightings:

1. The rain during the evening could have seeped under the hood and soaked the ignition or dampened the spark plugs

2. The feed line may have been clogged

3. A region of highly rarefied air created by the ball lightning may temporarily have deprived the engine of oxygen

Explanation #3 is the only one that makes a cause and effect connection between the ball of light and the car engine. Nevertheless, most of the press reports quoted only the first one (which did not make a lot of sense given that all cars and trucks started right after the ball of light left the scene). Menzel also argued against the claim of a new kind of electromagnetic force that flying saucers use to stop vehicles. He states “there are physical phenomena that the scientist does not yet understand, but he does know that electrical and magnetic forces do not and can not perform all the feats attributed to them by saucer enthusiasts.” Moreover, he said, “no imaginable single force – electric, magnetic, or gravitational – could possibly have caused all the effects attributed to saucerdom’s miraculous electromagnetic force. An E-M field with the postulated powers is as improbable as a force that would lift fallen apples from the ground and draw them up to reunite with the branches of their parent tree.” For Menzel to believe that UFO’s have such powers he would have expected the following events to take place:

• Thousands of automobiles should have been temporarily disabled in the neighborhood of every car-stopping UFO.

• Hundreds of TV sets should have blurred in the neighborhood of every TV-blurring UFO

• Physical evidence of landing should be found (shrubs crushed, grass scorched, ground disturbed)

• Moonwatch (on alert that week all over the US and Canada) teams should have detected the objects in the sky

Menzel focused mainly on one witness to the Levelland sightings (Pedro Saucedo). He claimed that Saucedo saw lightning when he reported the flash of light prior to the UFO. Saucedo, however, never stated on record that he saw lightning. The only references to the Levelland case that Menzel used to arrive at his conclusion are two newspaper clippings (El Paso Times, Nov. 4, 1957 & Denver Post, Nov. 6, 1957) and Aime Michel’s book (Michel, 1958). Based on the references listed on the Levelland chapter, it does not appear that he had access to the Blue Book files, interviewed any of the witnesses, or had any specific weather report for the area and time in question.

Edward Ruppelt’s (chief of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book from 1951-1953) opinion of the Levelland sighting is not clear. He did include the Levelland case on the 2nd edition of his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects in 1959. While he included the case in his book mainly to summarize popular cases of 1957, he did state that these sightings had a “new twist” (i.e. the stoppage of automobiles by the UFOs). Nevertheless, he did not comment whether the Blue Book explanation for the sightings was appropriate or not. He stated: “according to the best interpretation of the maze of conflicting stories, facts and rumors about these famous sightings, the only positive fact is that there were scattered storm clouds across West Texas on the night of Nov. 4, 1957. This was unusual for November and everyone in the community was just a little edgy”. But later in the same chapter Ruppelt stated: “The Levelland, Texas sightings were written off as “St. Elmo’s Fire” (parenthesis by original author)”[10]. Maybe Ruppelt used the term “written off” to suggest that he did not believe the Blue Book explanation. On the other hand, he did believe that there were storms during the sightings (a critical requirement at the time for the ball lightning explanation).