Stephenville Lights

Stephenville is a small town in Erath County, Texas, about 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth. The Brownwood Military Operating Area covers the county. To the southeast was protected airspace over President George W. Bush's ranch near Crawford.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008. Around 6:15 p.m., Steve Allen sat at a campfire near Selden with Mike Odom and Lance Jones. Allen had been a private pilot for more than 30 years. He could not clearly see a craft. He saw lights running corner to corner, "about a mile long and a half mile wide." They were completely silent, at about 3,500 feet. It was, he said later, "bigger than a Wal-Mart."

Then the lights changed. "An arch shape converted in a vertical shape, and then it split and made two of them," Allen said. The object left at an estimated 3,000 mph. About ten minutes later it came back, heading east toward Glen Rose. Two military jets, possibly F16s, were in pursuit. "I guarantee that what we saw was not a civilian aircraft."

Constable Lee Roy Gaitan watched with his 8-year-old son. He saw a red glowing object, "round, very large." Then came "nine to 10 flashing lights" that "shot off to the southeast sky at a blazing speed." Near the courthouse, James Hughes saw two bright red lights flying in formation. They made no sound. Anne Frazor watched lights cross Highway 6 near Alexander. "To me it wasn't planes."

In Dublin, machinist and deer hunter Ricky Sorrells described something closer. Early that January, he said, a "flat, metallic object" hovered about 300 feet over the pasture behind his home. Through his rifle scope it looked "very large and without seams, nuts or bolts." Then it "took off at a 45-degree angle."

Reporter Angelia Joiner broke the story in the Empire-Tribune. National news followed. Maj. Karl Lewis of the 301st Fighter Wing said none of the unit's F-16s had been flying that night. "I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner." On January 23 the Air Force reversed itself. Ten F-16s of the 457th Fighter Squadron had been training in the area. The Air Force blamed an "internal communications error."

Sorrells later said military helicopters flew low over his land. Joiner wrote about his claims in early February. She was told to back off. She offered her resignation. Her desk was cleared before her two weeks were up.

In July 2008, MUFON released a 77-page report by Glen Schulze and Robert Powell. It drew on FAA and National Weather Service radar data obtained through FOIA requests. The report said the data confirmed the F-16s. It also said the data showed targets without transponders "on a direct course to President Bush's Crawford ranch." Two returns implied a speed of about 2,000 mph.

Skeptics offered another reading. The Air Force, Tim Printy, and James McGaha and Joe Nickell in Skeptical Inquirer pointed to F-16 formations, strobes, afterburners and countermeasure flares. Clustered lights, they argued, are easily joined by the eye into one giant craft. Several witnesses, Allen included, first thought they were seeing jets in formation. McGaha said the radar analysts chose "187 points out of 2.5 million points of noise and scatter." Nobody has alleged a hoax.

No photograph or video of that night is known. Stephenville embraced the story anyway, selling T-shirts that read "Alien Capital of the World." The case was covered on Larry King Live, UFO Hunters and Netflix's Encounters. In April 2025, Tarleton State University students staged a play, Lights Over Stephenville.