UAP Case Archive

Shapes / Crescents

Crescents

Half-moons and flying wings, every one of them from 1947 to 1959. In those years pilots knew the Northrop flying wing and reached for it as a comparison. After that, curved shapes were called boomerangs and chevrons, and they appear on the Triangles page.

    Albuquerque, 1951: a silent flying wing with pairs of soft lights along its back edge. Drawing for reference only.
    Each crescent is one case, colored by status. Select one to open it below.

    Start with one night in 1951.

    On August 25, 1951, two sightings 300 miles apart gave the record its first wing lined with lights, the description that would dominate boomerang reports for the next fifty years.

    That evening in Lubbock, Texas, four Texas Tech professors sitting in a backyard saw an arc of 15 to 30 soft lights cross the sky in seconds, then a second group. They saw them again on later nights and tried to measure them. On August 30 a student, Carl Hart Jr., took five photographs of 18 to 20 lights in a V. None of the professors ever saw a solid body.

    At 9:58 the same night, in Albuquerque, a Sandia Base security guard named Hugh Young and his wife watched a craft shaped like a flying wing pass silently overhead. They put its span at one and a half times a B-36 bomber, about 350 feet, with dark stripes underneath and six to eight pairs of soft glowing lights along its trailing edge.

    Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book linked the two nights. He concluded the Lubbock lights were plovers, small shorebirds, reflecting the city's new mercury-vapor streetlights, and suggested the Albuquerque wing might be the same thing.

    The night of August 25, sorted

    • PhotographedCarl Hart's five photos show a V of lights. No solid body appears in them.
    • ProposedPlovers lit by new streetlights, according to Ruppelt, for the Lubbock lights.
    • ProposedThe same birds for the Albuquerque wing, as Ruppelt suggested.
    • OpenThe Albuquerque sighting remains a Blue Book unknown.

    What the record shows.

    Eleven cases from 1947 to 1959. These patterns run through them.

    The flying wing was the reference point.

    Witnesses at Cave Creek in 1947, and at Albuquerque and Mankato in 1951, compared the object to a Northrop flying wing. They described what they knew, so the drawings should look like 1940s aircraft, not modern boomerangs.

    August 25, 1951 is the turning point.

    Lubbock and Albuquerque on the same night gave the record its first wing with a row of lights.

    Size divides the group.

    Cave Creek's object was about three feet across and Mankato's about eight. Albuquerque's was about 350 feet. The same shape word covers both.

    Edge-on, a crescent becomes a line.

    A curved wing turning in sunlight flashes and seems to change shape, which matters both for the explanation and for the art.

    Every case is from the 1940s and 1950s.

    No post-1960 crescent with a named witness and a checkable source has been found. Later curved shapes are called boomerangs and filed with the triangles.

    Often told wrong.

    The crescent cases have a few stories that need straightening out.

    The story you may have heardWhat the record shows
    Kenneth Arnold reported flying saucers in 1947.
    He said the objects moved like a saucer skipped across water. His own drawing for the Army Air Forces is a crescent. His case is on the Discs page, where the saucer story begins.
    The Lubbock Lights were a single crescent craft.
    The professors saw lights in a U or an arc, and Carl Hart's photos show a V. None of the main witnesses saw a solid body.
    A flying wing was an exotic comparison in 1951.
    The Northrop YB-49 jet flying wing had flown publicly from 1947 to 1949, and Blue Book's chief knew of it.
    A half-moon craft flew over Walker Air Force Base in 1952.
    The airman reported five or six discs flying in a half-moon formation, not a single crescent.

    All crescent cases.

    Listed oldest first. Each card notes what kind of evidence the case rests on.

      Crescent or boomerang?

      This page takes shapes with a curved leading edge and no point at the back, and shapes witnesses compared to a tailless swept wing.

      Anything with an angled point, at the front or the back, stays on the Triangles page. That includes a V, a chevron, an arrowhead and a carpenter's square, and it is why the Hudson Valley and Phoenix are filed there.

      Borderline cases say so. Marshfield's "lopsided boomerang" of 1954 is here because it was curved and uneven.

      crescent: curved, no pointboomerang: angled point Crescents are on this page. Points go to Triangles.

      Left off this page.

      These are sometimes called crescents or wings, but are filed elsewhere.

      • Kenneth Arnold, 1947His drawing was a crescent, but his case is on the Discs page, where the saucer story begins.
      • Hudson Valley and PhoenixVs and boomerangs with angled points, on the Triangles page.
      • Petrozavodsk, 1977A glowing jellyfish that shrank into a crescent, on the Irregular page.
      • BOAC, 1954A shape-changing object that briefly looked like a delta wing, on the Motherships page.