THEY'RE BACK
Unexplained Lights Spotted In Stephenville SkiesBy WHITNEY WHITE-ASHLEY
Staff Writer
Whitney.ashley@empiretribune.com
Published: Sunday, October 26, 2008 3:20 PM CDT Dozens of Stephenville and Erath County residents reported seeing unidentified lights in the Texas sky last week.
Accounts started trickling in on Tuesday. But on Friday, they poured in, with dozens of people claiming to see unexplainable lights across the area Thursday night.
Erath County Sheriff Tommy Bryant said dispatch received multiple calls from people claiming to see bright lights in the southern part of the county Thursday. Callers reported that the lights would flash and disappear, then reappear a short time later. Charlie Carrasco, who lives in Stephenville, said he saw two fighter jets flying low to the ground around 8:30 p.m. Thursday, chasing flashes of light in the air.
Juli Gibson was riding her horse in the southwestern part of the county around 8 p.m. when she noticed the lights.
She said there were four white lights flashing on and off.
"It's like they were talking to each other," Gibson said. "It was just weird."
The flashing lights spooked even her horses.
Ashleigh Cole was also working with her horses around 8:40 p.m. when she turned her attention to the night sky.
"It seemed like it was really close," Cole said. "I've never believed anybody when they say they saw a UFO, but I saw one myself."
She said there were three lights in a row that would move straight up in the sky and at an angle.
She was about 10 miles south of Dublin and thought the lights were flashing and moving around for about five minutes.
Stephenville resident John Darby and his daughter were driving on Highway 67 near the Seldon cutoff when they saw the lights around 8:30 p.m. Thursday.
"At first I thought it was my lights reflecting off the power lines," Darby said.
But he quickly realized it was something more than a reflection.
The lights started out small and orange. They grew larger and began to display different colors in a beachball-like pattern. Then they disappeared.
His daughter jumped out of the vehicle trying to take a picture with her cell phone. The lights reappeared in the sky when she came back to the truck.
Darby said there were about nine jets traveling at a high rate of speed and headed for the Metroplex.
He is convinced they were not passenger airplanes.
"If it were my speculation, they were doing maneuvers with some kind of tracers," Darby said.
Monica Diaz was driving on the Northwest Loop near the high school in Stephenville around 8:15 p.m. on Thursday when she saw the lights.
"It looked like a row of stadium lights," Diaz said.
The four lights would turn on and off individually, but they would move as a group. The show only lasted about 30 seconds.
She pulled over and watched the sky but she never saw or heard anything else.
"It was very odd," Diaz said. "I don't believe it was aliens but it was definitely something different."
Diaz said the lights were white and round and didn't resemble anything close to an airplane.
D'Ann Wheeler is a Hico resident and a skeptic.
"I never had a personal experience until last night (Thursday)," Wheeler said.
She and a friend, who confirmed Wheeler's story but did not want to be identified, were stargazing around 9 p.m. when they noticed a lot of activity in the sky.
"There were jets all around them (the lights) but you couldn't hear the jets," Wheeler said.
She saw two sets of lights that she described as a string of pearls. Then the lights just disappeared.
"I have never in my life seen anything like this before. I went in the house and shook my head and thought, what did I just see?" Wheeler said. "The lights disappeared and then came back on a second time. They stayed on for about a minute."
The lights were large and white, and moved up and down with the jets close behind.
"I know they were big and far apart, but I couldn't tell how big or far apart," she said.
Wheeler said the sight unnerved her the rest of the night and she had a hard time sleeping. She even went back out around midnight to check the sky, but she didn't see anything.
Ashley Ainsworth was driving on Highway 377 near Tractor Supply Company around 8:30 Thursday night when she and several other cars pulled over to watch the lights dancing through the sky.
She counted six yellow lights on the horizon that moved in a circular motion. They disappeared completely but started blinking on and off.
"I'm not into that alien thing, but it's kind of weird," Ainsworth said.
She reported her sighting to Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
Darlene Ross, who lives south of Ranger, noticed two orange lights in the sky about 8:45 p.m. Thursday. The two lights turned into four lights in a straight line, one stacked on top of the other.
"It was just the weirdest thing I ever saw in my entire life," Ross said. "It was acting weird and it was scary."
Nick Horn caught part of what he saw Thursday night on video.
He was at his house west of Stephenville talking on his phone outside. He saw on orange light above the house and went inside to get his family.
He said jets were flying across the sky coming out of nowhere. He grabbed his video camera and caught about 20 seconds of lights flashing across the sky.
Nick's four-year-old brother Matthew was so excited that he tripped over a rock and bumped his head on the sidewalk.
"I saw four, five, six jets, then bam, hit my head," Matthew said.
Unlike other witnesses, Nick said he got a good look at the lights above his house. It appeared to be a metal object hovering about 400 feet in the air.
He said it moved away from the house and disappeared before reappearing closer to Dublin.
Steve Hudgeons, MUFON Chief Investigator in Texas, said he received reports of three sightings near Stephenville on Thursday. At press time, he had not yet interviewed the witnesses.
At least one witness came forward to say she saw lights in the Stephenville skies on Tuesday night.
Sherry Sechrist was outside of her house in town when she and her family noticed the lights around 8:30 p.m.
She snapped a few pictures on her cell phone and her mom even caught video footage on her phone.
Sechrist said the lights would flash and move up and down and side to side. She could hear jets buzzing around the lights, but doesn't think the jets produced the lights.
"I'd like to know what goes in reverse," Sechrist said. "The lights would fly over and then they would stay still."
United States Air Force Reserve Major Karl Lewis, public affairs officer at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth, responded to the numerous sightings.
"Seven F-16s from the 457th fighter squadron flew from Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth to the Brownwood Military Operation Area (MOA) for normal training operations, Thursday, 23 October 2008, from approximately 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. local time," Lewis stated in an e-mail.
Similar sightings made national headlines 10 months ago after reporting unidentified flying objects in the southeastern county skies.
Source: http://www.empiretribune.com/articles/2008/10/26/news/doc4904c9d94bd6a785478381.txt
