Stephenville, 2008: The Texas Lights the Air Force Said Weren't Its Jets

Tuesday, January 8, 2008. Erath County, Texas. About 17,000 people in Stephenville, ranch land in every direction, a lot of sky.

Sometime after sundown, people start calling each other. Lights. Big ones. Low, silent and fast, changing their arrangement as they move.

Steve Allen, a local pilot who owned a freight company, told the Associated Press the object he saw was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts," he said.

Within days, the small town was on national TV. Within two weeks, the U.S. Air Force had changed its story.

"Nothing from these parts"

The AP's first big story ran in mid-January 2008. It described several dozen people reporting a large, silent object with bright lights, flying low and fast. Residents told the AP it was larger, quieter, faster and lower than an airplane.

Allen gave the most quoted description. He also explained why people were rattled: "People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times."

He wasn't the only one with a story. Ricky Sorrells, a machinist, told the AP he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his home in nearby Dublin. Friends laughed at him at first. He said he later watched it through his rifle's scope and described something very large, with no seams, nuts or bolts.

"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Sorrells said.

The constable and the jets

Then there was Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan. He told the AP he first saw red glowing lights, then white flashing lights moving fast. Even with binoculars, he couldn't make out an object.

"I didn't see a flying saucer and I don't know what it was, but it wasn't an airplane," Gaitan said. "I think it must be some kind of military craft, at least I hope it was."

Many witnesses said they saw military jets that night too, some describing them as chasing the lights. That's where the story takes its turn.

The denial, and the reversal

Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, told the AP that no aircraft from his base were in the area on January 8. He floated another idea: two airliners, their lights looking bright and orange in the setting sun. "I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," he said.

Officials at Dyess and Sheppard Air Force Bases also said none of their aircraft had been in the area.

On January 23, the base reversed itself. Air Force Reserve officials said ten F-16s from the 457th Fighter Squadron had been training from 6 to 8 p.m. that night in the Brownwood Military Operating Area, which covers the airspace over Erath County. They said the earlier statement was a mistake and that they wanted to correct the record "in the interest of public awareness."

Kenneth Cherry, then Texas director of the Mutual UFO Network, told the AP the admission "supports our story that there was UFO activity in that area." He added: "I find it curious that it took them two weeks to 'fess up."

The radar study

MUFON didn't stop at interviews. Investigators Glen Schulze and Robert Powell filed ten Freedom of Information Act requests with the FAA, the National Weather Service, nearby military bases and others. Their summary report ran in the August 2008 MUFON UFO Journal.

According to the report, the FAA handed over 2.8 million radar returns from five radar sites, covering 4 to 8 p.m. that day. The 457th Fighter Squadron's logbook came back with most of it blacked out. Most other agencies replied that they had "no records responsive" to the request.

Here's what the authors say they found:

• An unknown target without a transponder beacon, tracked for more than an hour, mostly stationary or moving under 60 mph.
• At 7:32 p.m., an apparent acceleration to 532 mph in 30 seconds, then a drop to 49 mph ten seconds later. The authors acknowledged that some of this could be radar imprecision.
• A heading to the southeast, on a direct course toward the Crawford Ranch, the president's so-called Western White House. When the radar data ended at 8 p.m., they wrote, the target was only 10 miles away.
• No sign that the F-16s reacted to it.

"It is clear to the authors that the unknown object was real and not imaginary."

The report also estimated, from witness descriptions, an object at least 524 feet across and possibly closer to 1,000 feet. That number comes from witnesses' estimates of distance and angular size, not from radar.

The skeptics' case, fairly stated

There's a serious conventional explanation here, and it deserves a hearing.

The "denial" may have been a time-zone error. Skeptic James McGaha, a retired Air Force pilot and astronomer, called the FAA on January 17. According to Skeptoid's Brian Dunning, FAA records showed at least eight F-16s entering the Brownwood area at 6:17 p.m., maneuvering between about 7,000 and 34,000 feet, and leaving by 6:58 p.m. McGaha then contacted the base, which found its mistake. Dunning reports the original query used Central time while the logs were in UTC, so the base checked the wrong two hours.

Flares. Military illumination flares hang under parachutes, burn for four to five minutes, and can be seen from more than ten miles away, Dunning notes. A string of them can look like a single huge object with lights. Fighters dropping flares while maneuvering would also explain why so many people saw jets.

The radar is noise. McGaha's critique, quoted from the Skeptical Inquirer, is blunt: the MUFON analysis is "nothing more than cherry picking the 187 targets out of 2.5 million points of noise and scatter." Connect enough random dots and you can draw a line pointing anywhere, including a president's ranch.

That's a coherent story. F-16s plus flares plus a base that botched its first answer can explain a lot.

The gap

Here's what that story doesn't fully close.

Nobody has confirmed what kind of flares, if any, the F-16s actually dropped that night. Dunning himself says he couldn't find anyone who could confirm it. The flare theory is plausible, not documented.

Then there are the timings. The FAA records Dunning cites have the fighters out of the area by 6:58 p.m. MUFON's report describes sightings and radar targets well after that, including the 7:32 p.m. track and the last radar fix at 8 p.m.

And there's Sorrells, who described a solid, metallic, seamless structure through a rifle scope. Flares don't have seams to lack.

Finally, the Air Force no longer investigates UFOs, as the AP noted at the time. So the only people who systematically pulled the radar were civilian volunteers, and their critics. Neither side had the military's own sensor data. MUFON's report said the Air Force should explain what its radar detected that night. As far as the public record shows, it never has.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know:

• Dozens of people around Stephenville and Dublin reported unusual lights on January 8, 2008.
• The Air Force first said none of its jets were in the area, then admitted ten F-16s were training nearby from 6 to 8 p.m.
• FAA data released through FOIA formed the basis of MUFON's radar study.
• Skeptics argue the radar "track" was selected from millions of noisy returns.

What we don't:

• Whether the F-16s dropped flares, and if so, what kind and when.
• What radar targets, if any, remain unexplained after removing known aircraft.
• What the military's own radars recorded.
• What Sorrells and other close-range witnesses actually saw.

A town that knows its sky

Stephenville isn't a town of conspiracy theorists. It's ranchers, pilots and a county constable who said, plainly, he didn't know what it was. The Air Force's first answer turned out to be wrong. Its second answer is believable, but incomplete.

Maybe it was jets and flares and a lot of excited people. Maybe something else was out there, and nobody official was looking.

If you lived in Erath County in 2008, what did you see that night, and did anyone ever ask you about it?

Sources

• Dozens in Texas town report seeing UFO — Associated Press via KVIA, 2008
• Plot Thickens in Texas UFO Crisis — Associated Press via Military.com, 2008
• Air Force Alters Texas UFO Explanation — NPR, 2008
• Stephenville Lights: A Radar and Witness Study of the Events of January 8, 2008 (MUFON UFO Journal, August 2008) — Glen Schulze and Robert Powell, MUFON, 2008
• The Stephenville Lights — Brian Dunning, Skeptoid
• Stephenville, Texas UFO (2008) discussion, quoting James McGaha in Skeptical Inquirer — Metabunk