What happened
Just after sunset on 8 January 2008, dozens of people around Stephenville, a dairy town about 100 miles south-west of Dallas, saw a display of bright white lights above Highway 67. Witnesses described lights first in a horizontal arc and then in vertical rows, some flashing, some stationary. Private pilot Steve Allen estimated the array as a mile long and half a mile wide and thought it moved at enormous speed without a sound. Many people also saw military jets, apparently in pursuit, their afterburners blazing. Reports of a single giant craft spread, and the story went global: CNN's Larry King covered it, local constable Lee Roy Gaitan gave more than 100 interviews, and T-shirts declared Erath County 'the New Roswell'. At first the military said no aircraft had been flying in the area. On 23 January the Air Force Reserve corrected itself, saying ten F-16s had been training in nearby military airspace. MUFON later published a radar study claiming a large untransponded object had been tracked.
The official explanation
Astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha learned from the FAA that two groups of four F-16s from the 457th Fighter Squadron entered the Brownwood MOA, which starts about 10 miles from Stephenville, between 6:17 and 6:58 pm, matching the sightings. The base later corrected its denial; Skeptoid's Brian Dunning reports the error came from checking logs in UTC rather than local time. Investigators attribute the lights to illumination and countermeasure flares plus afterburners. Dunning dismisses the MUFON radar analysis as cherry-picked noise.
The anomalous case
The military first stated, firmly, that no aircraft were up, then reversed itself two weeks later, which many residents took as a cover story. Witnesses, including a private pilot, described a single vast, silent object much larger than any jet. A 2010 study by Glen Schulze and Robert Powell, using FAA radar data obtained under FOIA and published through the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, argued that radar recorded a large unidentified object in the area, a claim MUFON had also made in its own report. Reporter Angelia Joiner, who covered the story for the local paper, left after it stopped covering the topic, and the Washington Post's blogger raised the possibility of local pressure. Proponents argue that a training sortie does not explain the size, silence and hovering witnesses described, and that the radar trail deserves a full official review.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- The Stephenville Lights Skeptoid, Brian Dunning
- UFO Case: Stephenville, Texas – January 08, 2008 The Black Vault
- Stephenville, Texas (Stephenville lights section) Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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