The Stephenville UFO sighting remains one of the most talked-about unexplained events in recent history. The sheer number of credible witnesses, including law enforcement officers and a seasoned pilot, sets this event apart. Their detailed accounts, combined with intriguing radar data, have fueled speculation and debate.
The Initial Sighting
It began one night last week, residents near the west Texas town of Stephenville spotted an object in the sky and described it as faster than a speeding bullet and bigger than a Wal-Mart. Dozens of people - including a pilot and a police officer - said a UFO hovered over the farming community for about five minutes last Tuesday before streaking away into the night sky.
Pilot Steve Allen saw the object when he was out clearing brush off a hilltop near the town of Selden. Allen described the unidentified object as being an enormous aircraft with flashing strobe lights - and it was totally silent. He said the UFO sped away at more than 3,000 mph, followed by two fighter jets that were hopelessly outmaneuvered. Allen said it took the aircraft just a few seconds to cross a section of sky that it takes him 20 minutes to fly in his Cessna. The veteran pilot said the UFO, an estimated half-mile wide and a mile long, was "bigger than a Wal-Mart."
Law enforcement officer Lee Roy Gaitan said he was walking to his car when he saw a red glow that reminded him of pictures he'd seen of an erupting volcano. He said the object was suspended 3,000 feet in the air. Gaitan said he was so awestruck that he called his son to come and see - but he didn't talk much about the sighting until he saw a story about a UFO in the local paper.
Conflicting Accounts and Official Explanations
The Stephenville Empire-Tribune, which has written about the mysterious object, said about 40 people saw the thing - though some were too sheepish to admit the sighting until others came forward.
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Military officials, however, were skeptical. They said the residents are letting their imaginations run wild and passed it off as an optical illusion. They said it was likely nothing more than a reflection of sunlight on two airliners. Officials at a nearby air force base also said their fighter pilots didn't chase down anything that night.
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Eyewitness Testimonies
In “Messengers”, the first episode of VICE Studios and Netflix’s new series Encounters, residents of Stephenville and the surrounding area recount seeing something strange in the sky.
“All of a sudden I see some real bright, high intensity light off to the east, headed our way at a high velocity of speed. The lights was so bright it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was almost blinding to look at them,” said Allen. “Then what amazed me is there was no wind noise, no engine noise. There was silence. When it came past us, I developed the most peaceful, easy feeling I think I’ve ever had in my life. It was almost like a religious experience, like I was at one with whatever it was. Something I’ve never had before or since then. Then just as quickly as it arrived, it disappeared. “And in my head I’m wondering, is it War of the Worlds?
“I saw what appeared, I call it a bubble, or an orb, it was a reddish orange, fiery looking color, really big,” said Gaitan. “It was these bright lights, flashing, like a pulsating thing, like that. They had spread out. There was 11 or 12 lights that I was able to count. Shortly after, he too saw fighter jets, he said.
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The group invited people who had seen something to come and tell them their stories, expecting a handful of people. Instead, dozens of other witnesses appeared, claiming to have also seen odd things in the sky around Stephenville.
Radar Data Analysis
At first, the Naval Air Station in the region denied that any of its planes were in the area at the time of the sightings. Via Freedom of Information Act requests, Powell received primary radar data from five different antennas in the region from the FAA.
“So once I identified where the F-16s were, I went to start looking for objects that did not have transponders,” he said. “There are two radar points that showed an object moving without a transponder…The two data points match the time and the geographical location (of Steve Allen’s sighting),” he said. “This is outside of the military operating area.
“In the case of Lee Roy, I had about five data points on the radar indicating there is this object,” he said. “These stories check out with the radar data.
The MUFON Report and Witness Credibility
The Stephenville cluster of sightings has been said, by some, to be the most significant UFO event in recent history. The most often stated reason is the credibility and number of the witnesses. Three police officers (constables) witnessed this large craft. The officers were each at separate locations at the times of their sightings, yet they describe the same large craft.
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Unfortunately, these officers declined to provide any written statements to MUFON. They did, however, give verbal descriptions and provide illustrations.
Each officer saw a large craft, each reporting that it was gray. Each said it had red strobe lights on top. Two of the officers said the craft was silent. Each officer said that the object moved off to the northwest.
As for the "illustrations" the report just contains what appear to be computer generated graphics not the sketches one would expect to collect from a witness. It's possible that 1 or maybe 2 officers were versed in computer graphics and that's how they provided their "illustrations", but all 3? And all using the same program? What is consistent is an aircraft with a red strobe.
Other Sightings and Investigations
The incident was eerily similar to a UFO sighting a little more than a year ago at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. As many as 12 United Airlines employees spotted the object and filed reports with United.
The rest of the report is a list of some of the cases investigated by MUFON. One thing that can be determined is that nothing was determined. That is, the basic or should I say the now canonical version of the Stephenville UFO case as presented in the OP video is not really in the report. The evidence presented in the MUFON repost does not support this.
First of all, the report contains sightings from December 2007 through February of '08 from a variety of locations around East central Texas.
Conflicting Witness Descriptions
Witness Steve Allen, pilot and businessman, went on record describing a large object one mile long and half a milewide, moving away at high speed, soundless, and being chased by jet aircraft on after-burners breaking the sound barrier. The witness believed that the object he saw was approximately 1 mile long by ½ mile wide with a rectangular shape. This is based on comparisons with commercial airliners that fly over. The object made a low humming sound, not loud but audible. The witness thought the object's speed was about 10 times that of a regular commercial airliner.
The rest of the witness reports are more about blinking lights or bright lights on various days in various places. Four of the witnesses were from the Fort Worth area. Two of them reported large stationary objects with bright lights to the southwest of Fort Worth. One of these two witnesses reported seeing a bright cigar-shaped object to the southwest of Fort Worth moving fast to the west and at along distance away.
Additional Sightings
- I saw two very bright lights shining in no apparent direction. The lights were very bright, like a welding arc. The lights were dancing around and then they split different directions at a very fast rate of speed. I do not know what it was that I saw, but I don't think that it was a plane, weather balloon, a reflection of the sun or anything manmade.
- Caregiver "C. B." in Aubrey, Texas, observed two lights approaching rapidly from the east. Before reaching the witness they "made a sharp turn" south towards Denton. As they topped a small hill they saw huge bright yellowish blinking lights in front of them. The lights were scattered and very close to the ground.
- The witness, 45, was traveling on Hwy 4 from Granbury to Action, Texas, and observed a large blimp-size craft that was too low to be an airliner. It was not the kind of blimp that sometimes flew over football stadiums. She could hear a hum like a generator. It had red lights on the front and rear. The craft appeared to have large turbine engines on each side and moved slow and low.
The Play: Stephenville
A 2008 UFO sighting in Stephenville is the subject of an original play to be presented by Tarleton State University’s Texan Theatre starting April 10 in the Clyde H.
“When I first moved to Stephenville, I was tooling around on YouTube and I saw a National Geographic documentary about these UFO sightings in Stephenville,” said Tarleton State Theater Professor Dan Stone.
Stone, the director of the project, formulated a class to take the idea of a play from inception to performance. “It’s all their work,” said Stone. “I showed them how to do it and they took all the interviews and researched material, watched all the documentaries then synergized the stories. They did a great job. They had a blast and they learned how to create their own work.
“We interviewed at Fuzzy’s Tacos and people came and shared their stories,” said Stone. “I hung out at Jake and Dorothy’s, which seemed to be the center of all this. A throughline in the plot of the play is a reporter at the Stephenville Empire-Tribune who was the first to report on the story, which immediately garnered worldwide attention.
“It is inspired by the stories people told us,” he said.
tags: #stephenville #ufo #sighting