Jan­u­ary sight­ings put wit­nesses at cen­ter of media phenomenon

by Denise Gel­lene
Los Ange­les Times

STEPHENVILLE, Texas — Con­sta­ble Lee Roy Gai­tan saw the bril­liant red orbs hov­er­ing in the sky and hollered for his fam­ily to come out.

It’s prob­a­bly an air­plane, said his wife, Wendy, who didn’t budge from the couch. Only 8-year-old Ryan went to the front yard.

That’s a UFO, the boy said.

Gai­tan, a stocky, 44-year-old law­man who has spent 16 years patrolling the Texas scrub­land, debated whether to tell any­body about it.

“Peo­ple would say, ‘hey, this guy is nuts. He’s crazy,’ ” Gai­tan said of his sight­ing Jan. 8. In the morn­ing, there were no unusual police reports, but the next day, the Stephenville Empire-Tribune came out with a front-page story: “Pos­si­ble UFO Sight­ing — Four area res­i­dents wit­ness mys­te­ri­ous objects.”

Soon, scores more said they had seen the same thing. Stephenville, a ranch town 70 miles south­west of Fort Worth, became home to the biggest mass UFO sight­ing since the 1997 Lights Over Phoenix, in which thou­sands of peo­ple reported see­ing a boomerang-shaped object in the sky.

The wit­nesses

Stephenville is the largest town in Erath County (pop­u­la­tion 34,000), the heart of Texas dairy coun­try. On a cold Jan­u­ary night in nearby Selden, Steve Allen, 50, and a few friends stand­ing around a fire saw a set of bril­liant white lights that were quicker and qui­eter than any­thing they had ever seen.

The lights stopped near Stephenville, recon­fig­ured to form an arch “shaped like the top of a foot­ball,” Allen said, and realigned them­selves into two ver­ti­cal lines of ran­domly flash­ing lights. Then the object burst into a dirty white flame.

Ten min­utes later, the group saw the lights com­ing from the oppo­site direc­tion. Trail­ing them closely, Allen was cer­tain, were two mil­i­tary jets fol­lowed by two mas­sive red orbs.

The next morn­ing, Allen con­tacted Empire-Tribune reporter Angelia Joiner. She knew noth­ing about UFOs, but Allen sounded like a sen­si­ble man.

Allen “seemed very intel­li­gent,” said Joiner, a 47-year-old for­mer school teacher who had been a reporter for 18 months. Allen’s friends con­firmed the account.

Still, it was a strange story, and Joiner’s bosses were con­cerned. Man­ag­ing edi­tor Sara Van­den Berge said she was so anx­ious that she cried the next morn­ing when she saw “UFO” in the headline.

Then the tele­vi­sion crews started show­ing up. First came the local reporters, then peo­ple from “Good Morn­ing Amer­ica,” NPR and CNN.

“Do you believe alien beings are out there?” CNN’s Larry King asked, look­ing into the cam­era. “Do you believe they’ve come to Earth?”

Before long, local peo­ple started wear­ing “Alien Cap­i­tal of the World” T-shirts.

Gai­tan couldn’t stop talk­ing about an event he had ini­tially been hes­i­tant to men­tion. He took media calls came from all over the world, log­ging more than 100 inter­views by mid-February.

Not a weather balloon

A log­i­cal expla­na­tion for the lights was the mil­i­tary; a por­tion of Erath County falls under a fly zone used in train­ing exer­cises. When Joiner checked, how­ever, the 301st Fighter Wing sta­tioned near Forth Worth said no air­craft were near Stephenville on Jan. 8, when the lights were first observed.

Two weeks after the sight­ing, a break came in the case. Cor­rect­ing its ear­lier state­ment, the Air Force said 10 F-16s were on a train­ing mis­sion over Erath County when the lights were ini­tially spotted.

The town splin­tered into believ­ers and skeptics.

Joiner doubted the weird pat­tern of lights reported by Allen and oth­ers could be explained by mil­i­tary air­craft. Allen wasn’t buy­ing it, either. “Our mil­i­tary wishes it had what we saw,” he said.

Gai­tan rea­soned from the pres­ence of the F-16s that he prob­a­bly had seen a mil­i­tary exper­i­ment the Air Force couldn’t fully dis­close. “We’re in the mid­dle of a war right now,” he said.

Gai­tan nonethe­less found him­self repeat­edly scan­ning the sky for another glimpse of the lights. One Feb­ru­ary morn­ing at dawn, while dri­ving the high­way west of Stephenville, Gai­tan spot­ted a mys­te­ri­ous ball of light shin­ing through a field of leaf­less trees. As win­ter turned to spring, the incon­clu­sive­ness of the cos­mic news began to fade into the daily grind of ter­res­trial events. The town started look­ing for­ward to grad­u­a­tion at the high school, and the first award of col­lege schol­ar­ships funded by T-shirt sales.

Some were changed

Joiner, frus­trated with jug­gling her duties as edu­ca­tion writer, quit the paper and signed on as a spe­cial cor­re­spon­dent for the Jerry Pip­pin radio show, which reg­u­larly reports on unex­plained phenomena.