So, are UAPs actually real? Let me tell you about something that happened to me and three of my buddies back in the summer of 1988. We were seventeen, hanging out on top of this big limestone bluff out in the Texas Panhandle; one of those perfect, clear nights where the sky is just packed with stars. It was getting close to midnight and we figured it was time to head home. We started making our way back down toward the truck when two of us caught something weird out of the corner of our eyes.
There was this red light just kind of floating out to the east of us. Low on the horizon, drifting slow and easy in a southeast direction. Maybe four or five miles out, best I could tell. But here’s the thing. There was no blinking nav lights, no strobes, no landing lights. Nothing you’d normally see on any aircraft. And it was dead quiet. Not a single sound. Just this silent red light gliding through the dark.
The four of us took off running across the bluff to get a better look, scrambling up to the barbed wire fence at the edge. And that’s when things got weird. The thing just flat-out stopped. Mid-air. No slowing down, no gradual halt. It just stopped. We stood there watching it hover for a few minutes, and then it went absolutely nuts. It started shooting across the sky making these crazy sharp turns, accelerating like nothing I’ve ever seen before or since. No plane, no helicopter, nothing built by human hands moves like that. It was just impossible.
The four of us — TJ, Mark, Shawn, and I didn’t say a word. Not one single word. I actually reached down and pinched myself on the arm just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t. We just stood there, eyes wide, staring at this thing doing things that shouldn’t be physically possible. Then, just like that, it stopped again and went back to hovering. After a few more minutes, it slowly drifted off and disappeared into the night. Gone. That’s when I snapped out of it and shouted, “Let’s go!”
We half-ran, half-slid down that rocky slope, jumped in the truck, and floored it back across the bridge over the North Fork Red River, heading for the airfield on the other side of town about four miles away. I wanted to see if anyone was out there, if the runway lights were on — anything. But when we got there, the place was completely dark and empty. No runway lights on. No one was there.
So we kept going. We drove east of town on these back country roads, trying to figure out where we’d last seen the thing in the sky. We got pretty far out there. Honestly, farther than we really knew this area — when we hit this huge dip in the dirt road doing about 60 mph. The truck went airborne, came down hard, and slid sideways to a stop in a cloud of dust.
We all jumped out, and that’s when we saw it — an orange glow on the ground, maybe a mile away. TJ dug around under his seat and found this beat-up little pair of low-power binoculars. We climbed up on the roof of the truck to get a better look. When I peered through those things, I could make out a white light underneath the orange glow, kind of in a radial shape on the ground. That’s about all I could tell — those binoculars were pretty useless for detail. We tried to figure out a way to drive out to it, but we could not find any obvious dirt roads that seemed to lead out towards it. So we took turns watching it with the small binoculars. I can tell you, we were way out in the middle of rough pasture land. No highways nearby, no other headlights, no natural gas plants with a flare stack, and nobody else around. Just us and whatever that thing was.
By this point it was past 12:30 in the morning, and I was already over half an hour past curfew. We watched the orange glow for another 10 or 15 minutes, but it just sat there, not moving. Since it wasn’t going anywhere and my family was leaving for Oklahoma first thing in the morning, we finally drove back to town. Before we split up, I asked the guys to go back out there the next night and see if the glow was still there.
When I came back a week later, I asked if they’d done it. They had — and there was nothing. No orange light, no glow, nothing out there at all. I’m pretty convinced that orange glow on the ground had something to do with what we’d seen flying through the sky that night. I just can’t prove it.
THE GLEN ROSE/STEPHENVILLE SIGHTING
I’ll be honest with you. I almost witnessed one of the most talked-about UFO events in modern American history. On the evening of January 8, 2008, I was driving through the stretch between Glen Rose and Stephenville, Texas. It was one of those rare January days that makes you remember why you live in Texas; the kind of late afternoon that practically begs you to take the long way sometimes just to catch the sunset. So that’s exactly what I did.
What I didn’t know was that sometime after dark in that same area, the sky above it would become the center of a national conversation that’s still going on today. It was first seen near the area of the nuclear plant Somervell County has in its backyard heading west towards Stephenville. Word started spreading fast. Residents across Erath County were shaken and they weren’t quiet about it. Something had been seen in the sky over Stephenville, and the people who saw it were not the kind of folks you’d easily dismiss.
The sightings began around dusk and continued for several hours, with dozens of independent witnesses across Erath County describing a large, silent object moving at low altitude. Among the most credible voices to come forward were two primary witnesses who didn’t know each other and had no reason to coordinate their stories.
The first was Lee Roy Gaitan, an Erath County constable; a law enforcement officer with everything to lose by going public. Gaitan said he was walking to his car when he spotted a red glow that reminded him of pictures he’d seen of a volcanic eruption, suspended roughly 3,000 feet in the air. He was so awestruck he called his son over to witness it but didn’t speak publicly about the sighting until he saw a story about it in the local paper. He later said it moved so fast he couldn’t track it with his binoculars.
The second was Steve Allen, a pilot with 30 years of flight experience. Allen wasn’t sitting at a radar screen or reading a report; he was out by a campfire with friends when something caught his eye:
“All of a sudden I see some real bright, high intensity light off to the east, headed our way at a high velocity.”
In my personal interview with Steve, he was emphatic. The object was completely silent. The lights spanned roughly a mile long and a half mile wide. He described them as more like strobe lights than anything you’d see on a conventional aircraft, reconfiguring themselves from a single horizontal line into two sets of vertical lights before bursting into what he called two “white flames.” He put it simply:
“I don’t know if it was a biblical experience or somebody from a different universe or whatever, but it was definitely not from around these parts.”
Allen wasn’t alone in watching what came next. Another witness, Claudette Odom, standing on a hilltop with visibility extending more than 20 miles in every direction, watched as the lights flickered then went solid, shaping into a massive arch before forming a single bright vertical line that split into two; “extremely, extremely bright, like an arc on a welder.” And then the jets showed up.
As Odom and her companions watched the object hover outside the outskirts of town, they were startled by the explosive sound of two F-16s screaming directly overhead at low altitude, heading straight toward the UFO.
John Keel, a UFO researcher, believes that color systems may be associated with UFO sightings. He suggests that:
“UFO’s and their occupants move into our spatial and time [domain] they slow down, as it were, from higher frequencies, passing progressively through red, ultraviolet, violet, bluish green, and then if they stabilize within our dimensions, they become a glaring white [light] as they radiate energy on all frequencies. With radical maneuverings at high speeds, frequencies altered, and so the colors also change. Keel shows that in the majority of landing reports the UFO’s were said to have turned orange or red before they descended, then solidified when they settled to the ground and so the light would dim or go out altogether. When they took off, they again began to glow red, and it would depend on their subsequent movements as to the colors seen by the witnesses.”
The object tracked southward over several counties, moving toward Crawford, Texas home to President George W. Bush’s ranch and one of the most restricted airspaces in the country. MUFON’s radar analysis, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to the FAA, placed the unknown object’s flight path within 10 miles of the Crawford Ranch during an active presidential residence period; a detail that moved this story well beyond typical UFO territory.
The U.S. military’s initial response was a flat denial. A spokesman for the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth stated no military aircraft were operating in the Stephenville area that night. Two weeks later, that story fell apart. Air Force officials reversed course and admitted there were nearly a dozen F-16s over Stephenville that evening, attributing the initial denial to an internal communications error. Witnesses weren’t buying it. Reporter Angelia Joiner, who broke the story for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune, noted that the belated admission only seemed to bolster the witnesses, “It just makes it seem like something’s going on.”
The Mutual UFO Network sent a team of six investigators and ultimately received calls from 50 citizens who said they witnessed the event with state director Ken Cherry noting that the number and credibility of the witnesses was exceptional. According to MUFON, the object was tracked on radar for more than an hour, remaining stationary or moving at relatively slow speeds before rapidly accelerating to extreme speed, then decelerating again in a short span of time.
Robert Powell, a nanotechnology engineer and UFO investigator, obtained primary radar data from five different FAA antennas in the region. After identifying the flight paths of the F-16s, which had transponders, he went looking for objects that didn’t. What he found corroborated exactly what Allen and Gaitan had described, with two radar data points matching both the time and geographic location of the sighting.
Mr. Allen had witnessed the UFO travel at a high rate of speed being chased a few minutes later by F-16’s! In a report released under the Freedom of Information Act, the FAA had clocked this UFO on their radar traveling at some 1,800 mph! Carswell Air Force Base in Ft. Worth initially denied any F-16’s in that area this particular night. However, a man I talked with told me he had processed the paperwork for those F-16’s on this particular night. Sometime later, Carswell Air Force did claim to have conducted “training exercises”. But as in any attempted cover-up, as we say in Texas, they were a day late and a dollar short. By then it was too late. Several of the original witnesses including Mr. Allen and the county constable told their story on Larry King Live. Both the History Channel and Discovery Channel along with many radio talk shows have featured this event. The Glen Rose/Stephenville sighting has been listed #3 in the top 10 UFO sightings in the world!
I think about that drive a lot. A beautiful Texas sunset and a scenic route I almost didn’t take. Thirty to forty-five minuets between me and whatever was in that sky. But the people who were there that night haven’t forgotten. And honestly? Neither have I and I didn’t even see it.
THE SUTTON FAMILY CASE
Also known as the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, this is a well-known event in UFO history. It is considered to be an authentic close encounter of the third kind. The event occurred near the towns of Kelly and Hopkinsville, Kentucky beginning on the evening of August 21, 1955. Eleven eyewitnesses claimed that for several hours that evening and early morning, they repeatedly saw five silvery creatures about three feet tall which appeared to be glowing and floating above the ground.
The Sutton family was entertaining a friend, Billy Ray Taylor, at their farm house. When Taylor had stepped outside to get a drink of water at about 7.00 p.m., he observed strange lights in the sky to the west. He excitedly told the others about the “flying saucer” sighting but no one believed him. The others simply though he had seen a vivid “shooting star”. At about 8.00 p.m., the family dog began barking loudly and then hid under the house where it stayed. Billy Ray Taylor and Elmer “Lucky” Sutton then went back outside and witnessed a strange creature emerging from the nearby trees. The creatures were described as “a luminous, three-and-a-half-foot-tall being with an oversized head, big, floppy, pointed ears, glowing eyes, and hands with talons at their ends. The figure, either made of or simply dressed in silvery metal, had its hands raised.”
When the creature approached within about 20 feet of the Taylor home, the men took their guns and began shooting at it, one using a shotgun, the other man using a .22 rifle. The creature, they said, then flipped over and fled into the darkness. They were sure that they had wounded the creature, so Lucky and Billy Ray set out to look for it. As the men were stepping from the porch, “a taloned-hand reached and touched his hair from above.” They shot at the creature again as it was perched on an awning over the porch and it was knocked from the roof.
Within minutes, Lucky’s brother J.C. Sutton said that he saw the same type creature peer into a window in the home. Both J.C. and Billy Ray shot at it, whereupon it too flipped over and fled. Over the next several hours, the family claimed that the creatures repeatedly approached their home, whereby they continued to shoot at them each time they did. On one occasion, one of the family shot one of the creatures at point blank range. They said the sound resembled bullets striking a metal bucket. The floating creatures’ legs seemed to be atrophied and nearly useless. They appeared to propel themselves with a curious hip-swaying motion, steering with their arms. Apparently, if the creatures were in a tree or on the roof when hit by gunfire, they would just float away and not fall to the ground.
Around 11.00 p.m., the Taylor-Sutton crew decided to flee their home in automobiles. Thirty minutes later they arrived at the Hopkinsville police station. Police Chief Russell Greenwell said the witnesses were frightened by something “beyond reason, not ordinary.” He also said that these were not the sort of people who normally ran to the police; that something frightened them; something beyond their comprehension.” A police officer with medical training determined that Billy Ray’s pulse rate was more than twice normal. At about that same time, a state highway trooper near Kelly independently reported some unusual “meteors” flying overhead “with a sound like artillery fire.”
Several police officers accompanied the Taylor-Suttons back to their home and saw many bullet holes and empty shell casings. They further discovered what looked like an odd luminous area along a fence where one of the creatures had been shot, and, in the woods beyond, another area with luminous green light whose source could not be determined immediately. No samples were taken for further analysis.
Police left at about 2:15 a.m., but then not long afterwards, the Sutton family claims that the creatures returned. Billy Ray fired upon them once more, shattering a window. The last of the creatures was allegedly sighted at about 4:45 a.m. the next morning on August 22. Later on the 22nd, Andrew “Bud” Ledwith of WHOP radio interviewed the seven adult witnesses in two different groups. Ledwith had worked as a professional artist, and sketched the creatures based on the witnesses’ descriptions. Their descriptions were generally consistent, though the female witnesses insisted that the creatures had a somewhat husker build than the male witnesses remembered, and Billy Ray Taylor was alone in insisting that the beings had antennae.
The farm became a tourist attraction for a brief period but eventually the Suttons refused all visitors and refused to discuss the incident any further. Project Blue Book, the official UFO investigation office, never officially investigated the case, although a file has been kept on it. It is unclear why they did not investigate one of the most important close encounters of the 3rd kind ever reported.
Listen to the interview on What Is Truth Radio on Alien Agendas Part 1. Listen Here
