The Stephenville Lights

Stephenville is a town of about 17,000 people in Erath County, Texas. To the southwest lie the Brownwood Military Operating Areas, about 3,200 square miles of training airspace. Sightings in the area reportedly began in December 2007.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008. After sunset, before full darkness.

Steve Allen, a private pilot and freight company owner, was at a campfire with friends. Then came "some very bright, brilliant flashing lights headed toward us at a very high rate of speed." Allen judged the object "about a half a mile wide and about a mile long," some 3,000 feet up. The lights "reconfigured to a vertical scenario." It "basically came to a complete stop" over Stephenville. They watched for over two or three minutes. In silence.

Claudette Odam stood with Allen. "Bright, bright orange lights that were moving together, but back and forth," Odam recalled. "It was completely quiet. It wasn't like an airplane." NPR, which spells the name Odom, reported that the lights formed an arch, then a vertical line that split in two. Two F-16s roared low toward it.

Constable Lee Roy Gaitan went outside with Ryan, the constable's 8-year-old son. Red glowing lights. Then white flashing ones. Even through binoculars, Gaitan could not see what they were attached to. "They were dancing around and they were flickering." Then they shot off to the southeast "at a blazing speed."

In Dublin, machinist Ricky Sorrells had seen something by day, several times. A flat, metallic object hovered about 300 feet above a pasture. Through a rifle's telescopic sight it showed no seams, nuts or bolts. It left flat, at a 45 degree angle, faster than Sorrells could blink.

Angelia Joiner of the Stephenville Empire-Tribune broke the story. The Associated Press followed on January 14, then Larry King Live on CNN. Maj. Karl Lewis of the 301st Fighter Wing said no base aircraft had been in the area. "I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner." Then skeptic James McGaha asked the FAA. Two groups of four F-16s from the 457th Fighter Squadron had been in the Brownwood airspace between 6:17 and 6:58 p.m. On January 23 the Air Force said about ten F-16s had been training nearby, and blamed a communications error. "We saw what we saw," Odam said.

In July 2008, Glen Schulze, a former US Army radar systems specialist, and Robert Powell, MUFON's director of research, released a 76-page study of FAA radar data obtained under FOIA. They said the returns matched eight ground witnesses and showed an object without a transponder heading toward President Bush's ranch at Crawford. Mostly stationary or slow, it reportedly accelerated to 532 mph in 30 seconds.

Skeptics read the data differently. McGaha and Brian Dunning of Skeptoid argue the lights were F-16 flares and afterburners. McGaha says MUFON picked 187 returns out of about 2.5 million points of noise and scatter, which he calls "cherry picking." Dunning notes the radar was in clear-air mode, which picks up birds and insects. A police chief quoted in the MUFON report recognised one light as a flare, but said it "did not appear to decrease in altitude, as flares normally do." Joiner said none of the witnesses think they mistook the jets for the object.

Joiner soon left the paper and later called UFO reporting "a career killer." Merchandise branded Stephenville the "Alien Capital of the World." The case returned in UFO Hunters and in Netflix's Encounters in 2023. It is often set beside the Phoenix Lights, and is counted among black triangle reports.