Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  How this came to be is easily understandable. If we’ve learned one thing in this book already, people don’t like the unknown very much. And so, if we believe we’re being visited by other civilizations, we read the piles of books and articles on unexplained lights in the sky, then fill in the massive gaps—with wild tales of alien races, interstellar technology, and government conspiracies. If we don’t believe, we hear someone saw an unexplained light in the sky and assume, first, that he’s claiming to have seen E.T. Then we figure what he really saw was an airplane, Venus, swamp gas, or a helicopter, and he must be a bit foolish—maybe even a UFO nut. Then we laugh.

  Our UFO problem is profound enough that it leads some of us to pretend that we do know. Our UFO problem is stressful enough that it could even lead a man like Ricky Sorrells to the constable’s porch, fighting back tears—and thrust the whole town of Stephenville into the civic equivalent of an identity crisis. And if that’s the case, well—just what can we do about our UFO problem, when we seem so fundamentally incapable of letting the unknown be simply that?

  STEVE ALLEN THOUGHT HE was headed for a quiet night.

  A businessman with his own trucking company, Allen knocked off work a little late that day and drove to a friend’s house. The date was January 8, 2008. The temperature felt crisp at 50 degrees. A small fire burned in a ring on his friend’s property, and the evening promised to be a pleasant one. The sky in Selden, Texas, bordering Stephenville, is vast, and the elevation where Allen stood is high. But that night the cool temperatures sucked all the moisture out of the air, and Allen, who also flies small planes as a private pilot, marveled at the visibility. Central Texas is not Key West, Florida—it’s not built for tourists, but the sunsets are equally spectacular, lighting the sky in soft orange hues. Allen had missed that night’s show. But the sky that stretched out all around him was easing into a smooth, majestic twilight.

  Allen planned to stay a while, with a few friends, and reached into his jacket for a cigar, which he accidentally dropped in the grass. As he bent down to pick the cigar back up, it happened. Something in the air distracted him. A white light in the sky suddenly blazed into his peripheral vision. As he stood back upright, he saw, moving from east to west, a group of bright white lights. The lights spanned what he took to be a single object from corner to corner. He had never seen anything like this. It was huge, and even more incredibly for an object flying so near and fast, it made no sound at all.

  Someone asked the obvious: “Do you see that?”

  The rest murmured their assent and fell quiet.

  The lights moved across his entire field of view, quick as mercury, until finally they were in a position due west of him. Then they stopped. Allen could never make out any actual craft. All he saw were the lights he took to represent the edges of one object, which now appeared to be hovering. Considering the direction the object had traveled, he figured he was looking at its back end—the lights of which suddenly blinked into various configurations before going suddenly, blazingly white, like the arc of a welder’s flame.

  Then it was gone.

  The thing took off with the easy speed of an exhalation.

  The silence stretched on for just a moment. And finally, the three witnesses looked at each other. One of them, who doesn’t want his name published, headed for his truck.

  “Where are you going?” Allen called to him.

  But by the time the words left his mouth, Allen could see the guy had already departed for, well—the Land of Get Up and Go. For him, this unknown light had presented itself as something to be feared. And as his truck rumbled off, down a small dirt road, Allen and his remaining friend, the property owner, Mike Odom, went inside.

  You won’t believe what we just saw, they said to Odom’s wife, or something like that. And they were right. She didn’t.

  As a kind of reality check, Claudette Odom called the friend who had just bugged out, to see if he could confirm this crazy story.

  He answered his cell. “Go outside,” he told her.

  He was on the main road now, and he could see the lights doubling back. “It’s headed your way.”

  The three of them all bolted outdoors, and sure enough, there it was. This time it came in lower, maybe 1,000 feet above the ground. Still silent. But after just a few seconds, they heard the roar of two military jets trailing it. Selden, Dublin, and Stephenville all sit within 15 or 20 miles of the Brownwood Military Operations Area (MOA). Consequently, the locals see jets conducting exercises often enough to recognize them. These jets were also low to the ground, seemingly chasing the object, and their afterburners were turned on. The noise they made was deafening—a sound out of wartime.

  This repeat sighting lasted just seconds. And one of the things that stayed with Allen is that those jets fell further and further behind the object, till they all flew out of sight.

  There were other witnesses who saw strange things in the central Texas skies that same evening. In fact, between about 6:15 P.M. and 7:30 P.M., dozens of witnesses saw something. Reading over the reports later generated in the media and by investigators who arrived at the scene, witnesses sought prosaic explanations. But the object they saw didn’t descend, dim, or drift with the wind like a flare. Sometimes it appeared stationary, just hovering, before hurtling off at a rate of acceleration beyond that of a jet or helicopter. And whatever it did, it remained silent.

  A police chief in Gorman, Texas, driving along the highway, said he saw one white light at first, which he assumed was a flare, until he noticed that it didn’t appear to be descending or dimming. Then it just shut off, like a lamp light with the power cut. And in that same moment, three lights appeared in the space around it. He watched for a while but couldn’t match it up with anything he had seen before.

  Not far away, Lee Roy Gaitan, the county constable, had his sighting well after sunset. He and his family were going to watch a movie on Pay-Per-View that night, so he went out to his car to retrieve his wallet. The stars were fully visible in the sky. Just above the tree line, he saw a single, glowing reddish-orange light. The trees were a little more than a football field away, and the light seemed to hover just a bit higher than them. The light blinked off, then on again, a little nearer. He went inside to get his family. His wife just snickered and refused. His young son came back out with him, and now he saw numerous white lights that flickered in varying patterns before moving off, in one unified formation, at a terrific rate of speed. Though the lights appeared nearby, and he imagined their rapid departure must have taken a lot of power, there had been no sound.

  I spoke directly to a handful of witnesses of what soon became known as the “Stephenville Lights.” I spoke to the investigators who went to the scene, and I reviewed the reports they filed and the news accounts that ultimately appeared all over the country. I interviewed Angelia Joiner, the local reporter who talked to more witnesses, more intimately than anyone else could hope to, because they trusted her. And looking over all the material gathered, I must admit, there is no real, clear narrative possible here—or at least no clear narrative that utilizes all the available, credible information and arrives at a neat conclusion. As a reporter, I’ve encountered the same thing in homicide trials. Even seemingly allied witnesses, there for the prosecution, say things that don’t match up. So it isn’t just bias at work. It is the confabulation inherent in memory. Did the gunman come in from the east side of the street, or the west? Was the gun black or silver? Big or small? Did the gunman fire one time or three? Did he say anything? I’ve heard eyewitnesses disagree about all these details. The sighting of a UFO makes the whole process even harder because, well, c’mon: bright white lights in the shape of a massive, half-mile-long rectangle? That wink on and off, assume different patterns and blaze away at speeds that make F-16s look slow? Such occurrences don’t fit into our daily store of experiences. And so the mind is set to racing through potential prosaic explanations—and more extreme possibilities. Worse, when a vacuum of data surro
unds a mysterious sighting, people at the fringes of belief and unbelief come to dominate the conversation. And the effect is such that witnesses have to think long and hard before talking at all.

  Allen, the private pilot, went home that night and told his wife what he saw. He suggested he might call the newspaper. She said Please don’t. In fact, she told him he shouldn’t mention what he saw to anyone. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him. She was just being protective. It is hard to come off as sane when describing an event that sounds insane. Allen had seen something he could not identify; and culturally, in America, that means one thing: E.T. He was now the bearer of the stigma associated with the paranormal.

  Allen understood his wife’s concerns.

  He even shared them.

  He told her he’d sleep on it. Then, the next day, he picked up the phone and called Angelia Joiner at the EmpireTribune.

  LIFE HAPPENED FAST AT that point, not so much in Stephenville as to it. Joiner’s story, published on January 10, with Allen as her main source, brought forward numerous witnesses. The majority of them, including police officers and a judge, have never been publicly identified. Such is the stigma associated with unidentified flying objects. But Ricky Sorrells did go on the record.

  Sorrells is a machinist, husband, and father, and a few weeks before the January 8 sightings took place in Stephenville, he witnessed an event he later thought was connected. Sorrells was off work that day and decided to spend a few hours deer hunting. He has a secluded property, with neighbors he would need to hike or drive to reach, the nearest one a half-mile away. He got his rifle and stalked into the woods, thinking he’d be alone the entire time. After a few minutes of hiking, however, he got tripped up in some brush and, as he steadied himself, looked up. There it was. Right over his head. Maybe three hundred feet in the air. Barn-metal gray. Massive. He couldn’t see from one end to the other, could not see an edge, could not see the sky. His first instinct was to lift his riflescope to his eye and take aim. His breath was coming fast, his heart beating hard. Even as he realized a rifle bullet would do no damage to something this big, he continued looking through his scope. An aircraft loomed above him, without any rivets or visible seams. Its underbelly, however, featured a series of inverted cones, projecting up a very short distance into the object. And slowly, his understanding racing to catch up with his senses, he realized the object made no sound.

  Sorrells lowered his rifle, telling himself to calm down, to use this time to study the object, and think, and try and figure out what it might be. He estimates that he stood there, staring up, for a couple of minutes. During that time, the craft seemed to float above him, shifting its position once from his left to his right. Still, he couldn’t see an edge. And when the thing departed, there was no disturbance of the surrounding air, no noise to warn him. It went straight up, on a flat plane, so that he couldn’t tell where the front was—or the back. And when it lifted, it left, out of sight, so fast that he later told me, “If there is a word for that kind of speed, I haven’t heard it.”

  With Sorrells in the mix, this story didn’t just have legs—it had lift-off. The Stephenville Lights, which rightly or wrongly now included Sorrells’s earlier, daytime sighting, went international. Local hotels booked up. Joiner went from covering school board meetings and the city police blotter to … UFOs. The majority of her witnesses didn’t want their names published. But they seemed overwhelmingly sincere. They talked to her for the same reason Allen had decided, after his own sightings, to pick up the phone and call her: they were intrigued by what they saw, and they wanted to know what it was. At least three law enforcement officers described separate sightings of a massive airship floating over the town. One even got a lock on the object with his radar gun. And they came forward so people would know the civilian witnesses weren’t lying.

  Right away, the military issued denials. Multiple witnesses had described jets flying at low altitudes. But Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, claimed they had no planes in the sky that day at all. He also went on to claim the sightings might be attributable to sunlight glinting off an airliner—a kind of titanic nonexplanation, given both the twilight conditions and the witness accounts.

  The Mutual UFO Network, a collection of volunteer investigators, came to town and interviewed people. Visiting media and the MUFON members asked Joiner’s advice on everything from where to stay to whom to talk to, to where they might find good barbecue. The MUFON reps quickly made a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, citing the reports from local radar towers as public information. And they ultimately interviewed a couple of hundred people.

  In a town as generally quiet as Stephenville, this was a carnival. Sarah Cannady, at a bookshop called the Literary Lion, invited witnesses to write sighting accounts in her store. Barefoot Athletics, a T-shirt shop, usually hawks school spirit athletic wear, with slogans like, “Dribble it … pass it … we want a basket!” But they knew an opportunity when they saw one, and they started printing and selling UFO-themed shirts as fast as they could make them. Kids walked around town in tinfoil helmets, waving to honking motorists like the central attractions at a great parade. Some made a joke of guarding Moo-La, the fiberglass cow and semi-official town mascot on the courthouse square. Restaurants and shops put up signs advertising where UFOs should park. And the Fiddle Creek Steakhouse started selling what they called an “Alien Secretion” shot: 3/4 shot of Malibu rum, 3/4 shot of melon or Midori liqueur, 1/2 ounce of sweet and sour mix, 1/2 ounce of pineapple juice.

  It wasn’t hard to see, and certainly the town’s political leadership was aware, that circumstances were forcing them to make a choice: To Roswell, or not to Roswell. That similarly small town, in New Mexico, marked the supposed 1947 crash site of an alien craft. And Roswell had come to fully embrace that hotly disputed event as the centerpiece of its national and international identity, catering to year-round UFO-obsessed tourists with a UFO museum and an annual UFO-themed conference and parade.

  Stephenville had the opportunity to pull off a similar transformation. In fact, a few days after the story broke, city political leaders and representatives from the Chamber of Commerce even got together and talked about it in an emergency meeting.

  From an outsider’s perspective, Stephenville is a small town from another time, its reputation staked on dairy cows, rodeo, and its status as one of numerous American hamlets calling itself, “The Cowboy Capital of the World.” Nearby Dublin has the original Dr. Pepper soda plant. Tarleton State University gives the area an intellectual center. And the population claims two celebrity residents: Ty Murray, arguably the best competitive bull rider in history, and his wife, the pop singer Jewel. But Stephenville has, shall we say, room to grow. And while no one seemed sure how long the UFO might remain afloat as an economic engine, right now it was soaring. The local T-shirt shop was selling thousands of copies of their new design across the globe. “Stephenville, Texas,” it read, “The UFO Capital of the World,” atop a picture of a classic gray alien with a Stetson hat. Stephenville got calls from businessmen wanting to help them capitalize on this opportunity. Travel companies wanted to set up regular trips to the sights where witnesses saw unexplained lights. They wanted to talk about a museum and a gift shop. They wanted to bring in tourist revenue and put paying customers in local hotels and restaurants.

  A whole new identity.

  There for the taking.

  But Stephenville said … no.

  They didn’t want any part of UFO tourism. They liked what they are, just fine. But in a sense, such a decision is only mostly up to them. So by the time I got there, a little more than a year after the sightings, I found a place that was perhaps not the UFO or cowboy capital of the world.

  I landed in a place where the people clearly wanted to be friendly. When I wasn’t talking about UFOs, in fact, they greeted me with big smiles and talked about their town with pride. But when I fesse
d up, and said, “I’m here about the UFO,” the whole character of the conversation changed. Some people talked. Some even told me they saw it. But about half the people I approached smiled tightly and said something along the lines of, “Oh, how nice,” then lapsed into taut silence. At a local shopping center, where I stood outside questioning strangers for an entire afternoon, a half-dozen people heard me say, “UFO,” and just walked away without responding at all. The mayor of Stephenville started ducking me before I even arrived, failing to return repeated phone calls about my upcoming visit, then shunting me off to the Chamber of Commerce. The city’s former mayor, who had presided over the town when the lights appeared, also never responded to emails or phone calls.

  Stephenville had made a decision to keep UFOs from taking over the town. And in doing so, they had seemingly created two Stephenvilles: one anxious to know the source of those unexplained lights, and another that was simply anxious.

  THERE IS REASON TO be wary of this entire topic.

  The mind does play tricks.

  In researching this story, I ran across Tim Edwards.

  A restaurant operator in Salida, Colorado, Edwards had appeared on the now-defunct television show Sightings. The program broadcast a video that Edwards had taken of what he thought was a massive UFO, sitting way up in the sky, with an array of lights that flashed back and forth, from one side of the craft to the other.

  The video looked inconclusive, at best, but the incident reframed his entire life. Edwards changed the name of the restaurant he ran from The Patio Pancake to E.T.’s Landing. He credited the event with making him a more spiritual person. And he kept his video camera handy. Over the ensuing years he recorded what he claimed were UFOs pretty much all the time.

  More than a decade later, I called Edwards to see if the conversion stuck. His family informed me that he’d died of a heart attack. But he was a believer in alien visitation, they assured me, to the last.