It was a calm evening at around 9:20 PM on August 25, 1951, and some professors from the Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech University, were sitting around chatting in the backyard of geology professor Dr. W.I. Robinson’s home in Lubbock, Texas. Joining him were chemical engineering professor Dr. A. G. Oberg, physics professor Dr. George and Dr. W. L. Ducker, who was head of the petroleum-engineering department. As they sat around drinking tea and discussing various scientific subjects, something caught their attention in the sky above, and when they looked up it would begin one of the most famous and well-publicized UFO flaps in United States history.

What those professors saw up there crossing the darkened sky was a V-shaped formation of approximately 20-30 bright blueish-green lights like large stars, which were perfectly circular and quickly passed overhead to be then followed by yet another similar formation moments later. The professors, all esteemed and respected professionals, could not figure out what they had just seen, ruling out conventional aircraft and meteorites, and they excitedly discussed it amongst themselves before going to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal with their strange sighting. It made a lot of waves at the time, simply because these were trained scientists and considered to be very reliable witnesses, of which lead investigator on Project Bluebook, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt would later say, “If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn’t have picked a more technically qualified group of people.” Making it even more intriguing still was that they were apparently not the only people who had seen something outlandish in the sky that evening.

There would soon come a report from Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is located about 350 miles away from Lubbock, that supposedly occurred at dusk on that same evening. In this case, a high ranking employee at the highly secretive the Atomic Energy Commission’s Sandia Corporation had been sitting outside with his wife when they a massive, airplane-like object with an array of weird bluish lights along its wings cruise through the sky above. Almost immediately after this there had been a sighting made by a rancher who said he saw a similar V-shaped formation of lights that looked like “an airplane without a body.” Three women in Lubbock would also report having seen the same exact thing at around the same exact time as the professors’ sighting and there would be yet another sighting report from a Dr. Carl Hemminger, a professor of German at Texas Tech.

In the meantime, the professors who had made the original report launched an investigation of their own into the lights over the coming weeks, finding that over a dozen other people had seen them, and indeed they would make 12 more additional sightings of the strange lights themselves. These reports were meticulously detailed, mentioning altitude, direction of movement, wind speed, and angle of travel, and it was all enough to get the attention of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt with the Air Force, and by the time he got involved there had been hundreds of sightings of the lights in the region, with every witness describing the same thing. It was all over the news and captured the imagination of people all over the country, especially those in Lubbock.

One of these curious locals was a Texas Tech freshman named Carl Hart, Jr, who had taken to keeping a lookout through his window in the hopes of seeing the phenomenon for himself. On August 31 he finally got what he wanted, when formations of the lights passed near his house a total of three times. Hart had been keeping vigil with his camera at the ready, and was able to snap a series of photographs of the lights, which would become the public face of what were now being called “The Lubbock Lights.” The pictures received heavy circulation in newspapers and major publications such as Life Magazine, further propelling the mystery of the strange UFO phenomena gripping Texas at the time. The Hart photographs themselves would be analyzed numerous times over the years, and have proven to be frustratingly inconclusive and hotly debated to this day.

One of the Hart photos

Considering the nationwide sensation the Lubbock Lights were becoming, there were a lot of theories as to what they could be. Aircraft, weather balloons, birds reflecting street lights, the ever popular Venus, top secret experimental aircraft, satellites, meteorites, you name it and it was probably proposed at one point or another, yet nothing seems to really completely fit, and the witnesses continue to deny any of those explanations. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt himself would give a rather cryptic summation on what he thought of the lights, saying:

I thought that the professors’ lights might have been some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street lights, but I was wrong. They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they weren’t spaceships. The lights that the professors saw…have been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon…I can’t divulge exactly the way the answer was found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set up complete instrumentation to track down the lights. Telling the story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete anonymity… With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights “solved”—the sightings by the professors—the other phases become only good UFO reports.

Curiously, it remains unknown just what he means by “solved,” or what exact the “answer” really was, and neither Ruppelt nor his Air Force handlers have ever divulged anything more on the matter, leaving it maddeningly ambiguous and murky. The strange case of Lubbock Lights has in the meantime remained unsolved, with little progress in ascertaining just what was going on here. Was this some atmospheric phenomena, experiments with aircraft or rockets, birds, meteorites, or what? What makes this case very perplexing is the sheer amount of very qualified individuals who saw it, and who still stand by the idea that this was something from beyond their conventional understanding. Whatever the Lubbock Lights were, they have gone on to become a much-discussed and puzzling mass UFO sighting that will probably make the rounds for some time to come.

• Special thanks to Steve Baxter for the cover artwork.

It was right around Christmas 1980 when one of the most significant of all UFO encounters occurred in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England – near to the twin-Royal Air Force Bases, Woodbridge and Bentwaters. A memo prepared by the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt reveals the astonishing facts: “Early in the morning of 27 Dec 80 (approximately 0300L) two USAF security police patrolmen saw unusual lights outside the back gate at RAF Woodbridge. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed or been forced down, they called for permission to go outside the gate to investigate. The on-duty flight chief responded and allowed three patrolmen to proceed on foot. The individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest. The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank(s) of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate.” The notable encounter remains unresolved to this day.

In light of all the above, it’s interesting to note there is a UFO story – from the very same area – that dates way back to 1947. The account came from a man named Ronald Anstee, a long-time UFO researcher who died in November 2006. It transpires that Anstee had secured certain data that revolved around a flying saucer event in the summer months of 1947 – and very near to Rendlesham Forest, no less. The precise date was, and still is, unknown. What we do know, however, is that Anstee’s informant was a family member. Reportedly, the affair involved the sudden and brief appearance out of nowhere of a classic, saucer-shaped, metallic vehicle over RAF Bentwaters. It was said to have been around fifty feet in diameter. Such was the concern over what happened, senior military personnel were flown in and secret meetings were quickly arranged to try and figure out what had happened. The matter was never resolved to Anstee’s satisfaction: he fired off letters to the U.K.’s old Air Ministry, but failed to get meaningful answers. Anstee did, however, state that the presence of the UFO was somehow connected to a then-new radar system in the area. How he knew that, though, I don’t know.

In my 1997 book, A Covert Agenda, I wrote about radar-based research in that very area: “On January 28, 1935, the Tizard Committee, established under the directorship of Sir Henry Tizard, convened its first meeting, which ultimately led to the top secret development of a workable radar system of the type employed in the Second World War. Most pertinent of all, much of that highly classified research was conducted at Bawdsey Manor on the Deben Estuary. It’s just north of the town of Felixstowe, and a mere stone’s throw from what was for so many years the military bases of Royal Air Force Bentwaters and Royal Air Force Woodbridge.”

The reason why I know all of this is simple: I found the correspondence between Anstee and the Air Ministry at the National Archives in Kew, England. This was in 1994, when I spent significant time going through certain, newly-declassified UFO papers. I was able to see that Anstee had written a trio of letters to the Air Ministry – one of which concerned a 1954 UFO sighting of a Royal Air Force pilot named James Salandin. A deeper examination of the National Archives’ papers revealed that the office Anstee dealt with was called Secretariat 6, and whose staff were clearly not keen on getting into correspondence (or worse, into debate) with Anstee. This is made all the more clear by the fact that the only response from Secretariat 6 was to acknowledge they had received Anstee’s letters – and that was it!

It’s doubtful that today – more than seventy years later – we will ever get the answers to this intriguing (but short on data) case. It should be noted, though, that Anstee’s letters to the Air Ministry were written on January 30, March 7 and March 21, 1963. Nineteen-sixty-three was seventeen years before the Rendlesham Forest affair occurred. How intriguing it is then, that in the early 1960s, Anstee was digging into a story of a significant UFO encounter near RAF Bentwaters, which would go on to become known in relation to the Rendlesham case nearly two decades later. A connection? It all depends on how you put the pieces together. The best I can say right now is that one military base was involved in two incidents – and that’s it. Maybe there’s more to it all – but we’re certainly not there yet.

The concept of what has become known as “perpetual motion” is simple at its core. It basically describes an object or body that remains in continuous motion forever without any external energy source. If a machine were to be built using some sort of perpetual motion technology, it would theoretically run forever without any needs of fuel, batteries, or power of any kind. This means basically unlimited energy, freeing us from the tethers of finite sources of fuel and giving us devices that will never wind down or die out. It has become a sort of holy grail for certain individuals, who continue to plug away at this seemingly unobtainable dream, and it is just how amazing how much the idea of perpetual motion has enthralled people over a large portion of history.

Such an invention would be groundbreaking, completely changing our world, and it is a fascinating thing to think about it, yet according to our current knowledge of physics it just simply isn’t possible, as such a machine would violate one or more of the laws of thermodynamics. To put it in simple terms, the First Law of Thermodynamics basically is about the conservation of energy, and says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another, making the idea of a machine constantly creating its own energy without any outside influence impossible. There is also the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which in simple terms more or less says that an isolated system will always move toward a state of disorder, for instance heat will always dissipate and energy will be lost on any number of variables, including moving parts, friction, even sound, with the more energy formed meaning the more energy wasted. It is all much more complicated than this very basic explanation, but the gist is, a perpetual motion machine is impossible according to our current understanding of the universe and the laws of the conversation of energy. That is not to say that people haven’t tried, though.

Efforts to come up with a real life perpetual motion machine have been going on since way back into history. One of the first examples was built in the 12th century by Indian author and medieval mathematician Bhaskara, which was an off-balanced wheel that would supposedly keep spinning indefinitely through use of a system of containers of mercury on its rim that created imbalances that theoretically would keep bringing the wheel back around again and again for eternity. It didn’t really work, but it did display the ingenuity some were willing to produce in order to figure this conundrum out. Over the centuries there would come a stream of supposed designs, with various contraptions seeking to produce perpetual motion, including windmills, self-filling flasks, float belts, magnets, pulleys, gears, wheels, and many others, all equally impossible due to what we now know about physics, and none were ever successful, true perpetual motion machines, causing scientist Henry Dircks, author of Perpetuum Mobile: Or, A History of the Search for Self-motive in 1861 to lament:

There is something lamentable, degrading, and almost insane in pursuing the visionary schemes of past ages with dogged determination, in paths of learning which have been investigated by superior minds, and with which such adventurous persons are totally unacquainted. The history of Perpetual Motion is a history of the fool-hardiness of either half-learned, or totally ignorant persons.

However, the idea of perpetual motion is so alluring that even well into more modern times these machines have been proposed, physics be damned. Some of these proposed devices have even managed to create quite a bit of excitement in their time. One of the most infamous of these was first unveiled in 1812 by an until then rather unknown man named Charles Redheffer, who exhibited it in his home in Philadelphia, in the United States. His fantastical machine featured a gravity-driven pendulum with a large horizontal gear on the bottom, and a smaller gear that interlocked with the larger one, with the large gear and the shaft able to rotate independently. On the gear were two ramps that held weights, and it all supposedly worked by these weights pushing the large gear away from the shaft, which would create friction that would cause the shaft and gear to spin. This spinning gear would then power the interlocked smaller gear, and on and on it would go, supposedly forever unless the weights were removed.

Diagram of Redheffer’s machine

The machine was put on display and immediately became a smash sensation, drawing in droves of amazed spectators and scientists alike, all of whom were charged a hefty admission fee by Redheffer and none of who could figure out how it all worked. It was largely whispered that he had finally cracked perpetual motion, that he had achieved the seemingly impossible dream. Before long Redhefer was getting quite rich off of his oddball machine, and there was much excited speculation that he had actually done it and achieved true perpetual motion, despite raised eyebrows from the scientific community. Redheffer, emboldened by the response to his device, actually requested funding from the state of Pennsylvania to build a much larger version, and on January 21, 1813, state inspectors were sent to take a look at the machine before any money would be paid. Unfortunately for Redheffer, he had never let anyone ever take a good, close at his device, and it would soon become apparent why.

The inspectors arrived and were immediately suspicious when it turned out they could only view it through a window into a locked room. Even so, there were cracks appearing in Redheffer’s claims when it was noticed that the gear cogs were worn down in such a way as to suggest that the weights, shaft, and large gear were not powering the smaller gear, as Redheffer claimed, but rather the other way around. To them this was an obvious hoax, but the way they dealt with it is rather amusing. Rather than call out Redheffer on his scam, inspector Nathan Sellers hired a local engineer by the name of Isaiah Lukens to build a replica that was more compact and set within a solid baseboard with a square piece of glass at the top. There was no discernible way as to why it could work, yet concealed within the machine was a wind able motor that was wound through the covert use of a wooden decorative finial. With a little sleight of hand, the illusion was nearly perfect, and when he saw it Redheffer himself was so incredibly surprised to see what he took to be a real perpetual motion machine that he allegedly secretly offered Lukens a large amount of money to know the secret. After this, the news did the rest of the work and Redheffer was undone and exposed through a taste of his own medicine.

Amazingly, this did not put a stop to Redheffer. Undeterred, he simply moved to New York to set up shop there where his reputation hadn’t been as tarnished, once again enjoying some amount a fame and drawing in droves of curiosity seekers. One of these was an engineer by the name of Robert Fulton, who noticed something fishy as he observed the mysterious device in action. He could see a slight wobble to it, and also noticed a very slight unevenness to its speed and the sounds it made, both things that should not be present in a real perpetual motion device. A real device of this type would need to be frictionless and perfectly silent because friction and sound would be a loss of energy, so these were glaring clues that something was off, especially to his trained eye. Realizing that it was obviously being somehow powered by crank motion, Fulton confronted Redheffer on the spot, but the inventor amazingly held his ground, insisting that the machine was real.

Fulton then challenged Redheffer to allow him to search for any possible source of outside power, to which Redheffer foolishly agreed. After this, Fulton simply tore out a section of wall in full view of a gathered audience to find a concealed cable that led to an upstairs room, where an old man was found operating a crank. The spectators, who had all paid good money to see the amazing “perpetual motion machine,” were less than thrilled. They reportedly immediately took out their frustrations on the machine itself, smashing it to pieces, and might have done the same to Redheffer if he hadn’t already hi-tailed it out of there to later skip town. Unbelievably, Redheffer would claim several years later that he had created another machine, and that it was totally, for sure real this time, and he even got a patent for it in 1920, but since it was never put on display or examined and the patent was lost in a fire who knows if there was any truth to it.

Another notable perpetual motion machine was unveiled in 1979 by American inventor Joseph Newman. The machine was called the DC motor, and according to him worked by using “energy in a magnetic field consisting of matter in motion,” and which he claimed could produce more energy than was put into it. He even went about seeking a patent for his invention, but it was denied as the Patent Office could not see how it could feasibly work. When Newman appealed this decision, it was found in an investigation by the National Bureau of Standards that the device’s power output was never above 100% of the power supplied to it, which was not promising. Newman would continue to adamantly insist that his machine really worked, but he sort of fell into obscurity after making all manner of other crackpot claims over the years. Whether his supposed perpetual motion machine ever really worked or not remains unknown, but everything we know about science says probably not.

Interestingly, the United States Patent and Trademark Office gets a steady stream of proposals for perpetual motion machines even today, to the point where the whole patent system was changed because of it. Whereas previously a working model of an invention was not required, only that an examiner believe the concept could work or saw no reason why it shouldn’t, the USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice has been changed to refuse perpetual motion machine patents that do not have a physical prototype that can be examined. The United Kingdom Patent Office also has a policy against perpetual motion machines, stating “Processes or articles alleged to operate in a manner which is clearly contrary to well-established physical laws, such as perpetual motion machines, are regarded as not having industrial application.”

The reality of perpetual motion seems to be beyond us, and these patent offices realize this, yet people keep on trying, with new designs put out all of the time and not a single one of them that has been shown to actually work without some sort of trickery. The universe seems to be dead set on never allowing it to happen, so why do they keep trying? There are likely several factors. One is that the idea is so irresistible that for many it seems that it is worth pursuing no matter what the obstacles. Another is probably that for some it seems like a challenge, a way to break through long held paradigms like the revolutionary explorers, inventors and scientists of the past. After all many of the facts and laws of the universe that we take for granted now were once equally scoffed at and in some cases might as well have been magic. For these people there is a chance, no matter how small, that a way can be found to make perpetual motion work despite the physical limitations. On top of all of this is the unfortunate possibility that many of these would-be inventors simply don’t grasp the established impossibility of it all, and one Donald Simanek, a former physics professor at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, has offered his opinion on why people keep trying perpetual motion in an interview with Live Science:

My hunch is that they are motivated by their incomplete understanding of physics. The perpetual motion machine inventors’ view of physics is a collection of unrelated equations for specific purposes. They fail to grasp the greatest strength of physics — its logical unity. For example, the laws of thermodynamics do not arise by fiat. They are derivable from Newton’s laws and the kinetic model of gases and have been well-tested experimentally … You can’t simply discard one law you ‘don’t like’ without bringing the whole logical structure of physics crashing down. 

Could there be some place where the geometry (and the physics) are different? Maybe, but we have no clue where to find that place, and one might wonder whether we could even go there, or exploit it for our purposes. That’s armchair speculation, and science-fiction, not science.

For now, the notion of a real working perpetual motion machine really does sit in the realm of science fiction, and it has mostly been a pursuit abandoned by most real scientists. It has come to be relegated to mad inventors working in their garages against all odds to try and make the impossible possible. There is little chance that there will ever be a practical solution to the physical hurdles in the way of achieving perpetual motion, but just as many have tried throughout history there are surely those who will still keep on trying. Whether it will ever gain any credence or results remains to be seen.

Just as you start to feel overwhelmed by all of the troubles going on in the world around you, NASA discovers events happening throughout the universe that give us a reassuring “Things could be worse.” The latest comes from astronomers who search the vast array of universal scans made by the Kepler space telescope for strange anomalies. In archival data they missed the first time around, researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and the Australian National University in Canberra found a white dwarf that showed a sudden, intense glow … a glow that came from a nearby brown dwarf that it was sucking the life out of. Vampire stars are a thing … should we be worried?

“The white dwarf is stripping material from the brown dwarf, sucking its essence away like a vampire. The stripped material forms an accretion disk around the white dwarf, which is the source of the super-outburst. Such systems are rare and may go for years or decades between outbursts, making it a challenge to catch one in the act.”

In a recent press release, NASA used the term “vampire” to explain what lead author and astronomer Ryan Ridden-Harper calls a less-descript “new WZ Sagittae-type cataclysmic variable” in his paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Kepler space telescope has been retired since 2018, but its nearly decade-long scans of the universe to search for exoplanets left a huge database that astronomers continue to study for minute anomalies that could be major stellar events.

“At 25 days after the peak brightness a bump in the light curve appears to signal a subtle rebrightening phase implying that this was an unusual type-A outburst. This is the only WZ Sge-type system observed by K2/Kepler during an outburst.”

Whatever it looks like close up, it can’t be good

Anomalies like that one. Only Kepler could have detected this unusual super-outburst where a previously unknown dwarf nova suddenly brightened by a factor of 1,600 over less than a day before slowly fading. The cause was the white dwarf that the brown dwarf is orbiting at an extremely fast rate of once every 83 minutes at a distance similar to that between Earth and the Moon. The white dwarf is a dense dying star with sufficient gravity to suck what energy and matter is left in the dead brown dwarf … a kind of death dance where the partners swing around connected by an accretion disk of matter that causes the super-outburst.

A recreation of two stars in a death dance?

“This type of dwarf nova system is relatively rare, with only about 100 known. An individual system may go for years or decades between outbursts, making it a challenge to catch one in the act.”

Yet Kepler did, due to its relentless pace of taking a snapshot every 30 minutes with a view that only this space telescope could have. This discovery has astronomers enthused to go back through Kepler’s data and search for more of these rare vampire stars. To answer the question: no, we don’t have to worry. The vampire is in the Ursa Major constellation and our own Sun is a long way from being in either a vampire or dying state.

Kudos to Kepler and to NASA. It’s nice to see that NASA still respects the knowledge and experience of an old-timer … a lesson for us all.