Stephenville, Texas, UFO Sightings
by Don Ledger
FATE :: March 2008

No one can say why a particular anomalous event becomes a media sensation, but that is just what happened on January 8, 2008, in Texas. In and around the town of Stephenville, reports flooded in to authorities, radio stations, and newspapers of unidentified objects flying over that area at low levels. Some of the UFOs were said to be moving slowly and displaying odd light formations. Others were described as larger than the proverbial football field and moving at tremendous speeds.

One witness to these events was Steve Allen, age 50, a pilot and owner of a business in Glen Rose, Texas, about ten miles southeast of Stephenville.

At 6:12 p.m. on Tuesday, January 8, Allen and Mike Odom, his close friend of 45 years, were sitting around a campfire with their acquaintance Lance Jones on a small knoll outside Selden three miles east of Stephenville next to Route 67. The men were unwinding after work, enjoying the first mild night in a week. The sun was halfway down over the horizon to the west when Allen spotted an enormous object approaching rapidly from the east.

Allen described an object he believed to be a mile long and a half-mile high comprised of four large, intensely bright white lights. Each light was the size of a quarter held at arm’s length.

The lights were locked in formation a half-mile north of them and gliding noiselessly westward at a phenomenal rate of speed, which Allen estimated to be about 3,000 miles per hour.

Allen figured that the base of the object was between 2,500 and 3,000 feet above the ground. Since he had no way of knowing the size of the lights, however, it could have been higher. If so, it was substantially greater in size as well.

After the lights passed over their position, Lance Jones became so upset that he left for home. Allen and Odom were disturbed as well, and left together. Allen remembers thinking that if this is some sort of “War of the Worlds” playing out, he should be home with his family.

Arriving at Odom’s home a few minutes after the incident, they told Odom’s wife about the sighting and Jones’s reaction. Concerned, she called the Jones residence. Jones told her that the thing was coming back, traveling east to west.

Allen and the Odoms rushed outside and watched as the object moved in an easterly direction a half-mile south of their position. The light configuration had changed and it was now moving at perhaps 600 to 700 miles per hour. They observed two F-16s in pursuit, accelerating in afterburners.

Two of Allen’s pilot friends reported later that they heard double sonic booms at that time. George Bales and the other pilot were at Bales’s home in Hico, Texas, 20 miles east-southeast of Allen’s position.

Another witness, James Huss, was in Stephenville that night. In an interview with researcher Robert Hastings, Huss produced a drawing that showed two identical horseshoe-shaped lights with closed ends, indicating either a void or solid in between. The lights glowed brightly and erratically and appeared flame-like. Huss told Hastings that “while he couldn’t discern an unlit object between or around them, they nevertheless moved perfectly in tandem, with no deviation in the distance between them… The lights hovered for a few seconds, almost directly overhead, before slowly moving west to east.”

The Air Force quickly denied having any F-16s in the air on January 8. Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no aircraft from his base were in the area that night. He surmised that the UFO was an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes.

“I’m 90-percent sure this was an airliner,” Lewis said. “With the sun’s angle, it can play tricks on you.”

Questions about the huge unidentified objects refused to go away, garnering national media attention including one-hour specials on Larry King Live.

During the hoopla that surrounded the Stephenville sightings, no one seemed to notice that all of this activity was taking place about 22 miles from the edge of the restricted airspace surrounding President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Then, suddenly, the Air Force did an about-face, rescinding its claim that no planes were in the sky on January 8. On Wednesday, January 23, Maj. Lewis asserted that they had ten F-16s training in the Brownwood Military Operations Area (MOA). Unlikely as it sounds, they had made a mistake and it had taken two weeks to discover it.

Surely, the Air Force would only risk such an embarrassing admission for a greater reason: to muddy the waters and throw doubt on the witnesses’ claims. And perhaps there was another objective, one which brings us back to the Bush ranch.

It is no secret that the Bush ranch is close by, so why have the media not picked up on this? Where were the local newspapers from Dallas and Stephenville? Where was CNN? It was never brought up on either of the Larry King Live shows dedicated to the Stephenville sightings.....Read the rest of this article exclusively in the March 2008 issue of FATE!