suddenly the squiggle ufo vid (pics in post #13) was 'closest' to what allen saw
jan 25 Japan interested in UFO sighting
Article:
Videos are starting to = come out, Allen said. I've gotten about ten but only two are worth anything.
Allen said the video aired by Channel 11 News Wednesday night is just a snippet of the 14 minute film he now has in his possession from a source not wishing to be identified, and it comes closest to being what he, Lance Jones, and Mike [Odom] and Claudette Odom saw on that life changing night.
It's not exactly what we saw, but it was changing shapes, Allen said. think this is it.
ps it was the local reporter who first said "dozens of reports". (over multiple days)
reporter angelina joiner (npr interview jan 16, 2008)
"i would say several dozen"
I think we probably agree that the "hundreds" of witnesses referred to re. Stephenville in the OP is perhaps exaggerated, if we take "witnesses" to mean people who thought they were seeing an extraterrestrial craft (or something else radically unusual).
And that the "dozens" of witnesses mentioned by MUFON's Robert Powell doesn't seem to mean that dozens of people believe they saw a mile-wide structured craft.
My comparing of Stephenville 2008 and Farmington 1950 was because both are said to have had, shall we say, substantial numbers of witnesses (much the more so in Farmington) and some of those witnesses make additional extraordinary claims, e.g. a 1-mile-plus sized flying craft at Stephenville; Virgil Riggs, speaking at a MUFON conference 60+ years after Farmington, said that he had seen UFOs "...from horizon to horizon" (and that was the second day of a three-day flap; surely someone had a camera?)
It doesn't seem likely that in either case, the few reports with the highest "strange" quotient are representative of what most witnesses saw.
In both cases, nothing was photographed, and there is very little evidence that normal life was affected.
suddenly the squiggle ufo vid (pics in post #13) was 'closest' to what allen saw
jan 25 Japan interested in UFO sighting
Article:
Videos are starting to = come out, Allen said. I've gotten about ten but only two are worth anything.
Allen said the video aired by Channel 11 News Wednesday night is just a snippet of the 14 minute film he now has in his possession from a source not wishing to be identified, and it comes closest to being what he, Lance Jones, and Mike [Odom] and Claudette Odom saw on that life changing night.
It's not exactly what we saw, but it was changing shapes, Allen said. think this is it.
ps it was the local reporter who first said "dozens of reports". (over multiple days)
reporter angelina joiner (npr interview jan 16, 2008)
"i would say several dozen"
Interesting. After watching a bit more of the OP video (which is painfully boring) I started to have my own possible explanation.
IF the MUFON report is correct and they did indeed receive 10-17 reports on the evening of 1-8-'08, then some of that was related to a lot of F16 activity in the area for whatever reason. One of those witnesses/reports was from Steve Allen. As I alluded to in my previous post, there is a good chance that those that report stuff to MUFON know about MUFON and what MUFON is all about.
In the video, Steve Allen contacts a local newspaper reporter and tells her what he saw. According to the video, the reporter's editor passes on the story, but after she leaves for the day, the reporter manages to get the story run. Editor is upset but backs down when she sees the big response. So, Allen is the prime motivator of the story and is the guy in the video 13+ years later. He's also the guy that states he spoke to "hundreds" of people about the event. He's one of the witnesses that claims the "craft" is 1 mile by 1/2 mile. He claims the F16s are chasing it.
Then he claims these squiggly lines are what he saw? It's not what he described.
I think he got this whole thing going and MUFON jumped on the band wagon. 13 years later he was still reliving the event.
Isn't this the case where a police officer did capture one ( rather bad ) photo of the object ? I always get this incident confused with a very similar one in Illinois in 2000.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were sent to all governmental and military bases with access to logbooks, witnesses, and radar data, to the events that took place on January 8th in the Dublin-Stephenville area. Copies of these FOIA requests and the replies are in the appendix. The radar data FOIA was sent out to the FAA on January 16th and the remaining FOIA requests were sent out within the first 2-3 three weeks of the event and went out to the following organizations:
The Federal Aviation Administration, Ft. Worth, TX.
The National Weather Service, Ft. Worth, TX.
The Dept of the Air Force, 30th Space Wing, Vandenberg, CA
The Dept of the Air Force, 21st Space Wing, Peterson AFB, CO
Dyess Air Force Base, Abilene, TX.
Sheppard Air Force Base, Wichita Falls, TX.
10th Air Force, Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base, Ft. Worth, Tx.(also known as Carswell
AFB)
4th Marine aircraft Wing, Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base, Ft. Worth, Tx.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Washington, D.C.
Dept of the Army, Ft. Hood, TX.
Radar data was received from both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Weather Service. The FAA quickly responded to a FOIA sent on January 16 and mailed out the completed results within 5 weeks. The FAA was also very helpful in answering questions and was very
responsive in all of their communications. The FAA provided approximately 2.8 million radar returns that were on a CD containing 139 megabytes of data. This data was received in PC standard text format and covered over 4 continuous hours of time (4pm to 8pm CST) and had been collected and recorded from each of 5 different radar antennas located near and around the DFW airport airspace.
The text data was converted into Microsoft Excel format and the analysis was completed using Excel routines. The Fort Worth ARTCC deserves high praise and an offer of deep appreciation for their rapid and compliant response to this important FOIA. The NWS was also very quick to respond to the FOIA request. Their data is not as valuable for analysis of aircraft as the radar data from the NWS is based on Doppler radar that initiates a data signal collection only once every 10 minutes in clear weather and once every 5 minutes during inclement weather.
The authors of this report invested and dedicated several hundred hours in the analysis of the radar data that was obtained. A later report will be written to detail the steps used in the development of this report.
Have MUFON released the 139MB of raw radar data? I looked around a bit but didn't find it. Did they ever publish the follow up report with technical details of how the analysis was performed? I also did not find that.
Some people say they are just cherry picking random radar data to fit with witness descriptions. For example, CFI's Skeptical Inquirer says
Article:
These raw data contain 2.5 million points of noise and scatter. MUFON’s report selected just 187 of these points to contend that radar had tracked a huge “object” at least 524 feet in size, traveling near the Western White House (the Bush ranch, which is fifty miles southeast of Stephenville). “MUFON’s radar analysis is nothing more than cherry picking the 187 targets out of 2.5 million points of noise and scatter to make a track moving forty-nine mph for over one hour,” says [James] McGaha. “This analysis is absurd!”
It would be good to be able to see the raw data and how exactly it was processed and analyzed.
Regarding the video in the OP. As noted above, the thing is over 40:00 and would have been an hour-long episode on TV with commercials. The rights to the NatGeo channel were bought by Discovery Network or something like that, as was turned into a standard mystery mongering network. Not to say there is no evidence in this show, just that I would suspect a particular slant.
Sure enough, in the first 2:00 we get an anonymous guy, could be an actor, describing a number of bright lights that were 1. coming at them at a high rate of speed but then, 2. craft moving east to west at a speed no conventual aircraft could do and then 2 F16s "chasing" them. With an artist rendering (cartoon) of the event.
This is quickly followed up by Larry King talking about it, before we move on to UFOlogist Stanton Friedman and UFO evangelist journalist Leslie Kean confirming that the US government has been covering up the existence of UFOs since the '40s. So not a very open-minded take so far. With in 2 minutes the show confirms the presence of UFOs, and the government cover up of said UFOs setting the stage for what I assume will be a number of mutually exclusive versions of something in Texas that was obviously a UFO (alien). Maybe some of this is just the show's opening.
The next 5:00 or so is just Kean running her mouth about UFO cover ups and her "groundbreaking" NYT article in 2017 where she was told stories by Elizondo and she discovered the largely non-existent AATIP program and more government cover ups blah blah blah....
By 7:00 we get back to Texas and are told that "a large number of people" saw this UFO (the guy claiming this is not named but I think it's Chris Mellon), though we're still just treated to the same guy from the opening. Turns out he's a private pilot named Steve Allen. He describes it in 2021, as 7 blinking lights across the back of it that change shape from rectangle to heart shape to straight line and bigger than a Walmart:
The problem is he described it as 2 intense red lights with 1 white light in the middle back in 2008:
So less than 10:00 in we have a lecture by Leslie Kean and are primary witness is missremebering what he said on video 13 years prior.
Maybe I'll watch a bit more if I get have time. Better yet @ideamug could provide timestamps for anything compelling in this 42:00.
Just a few more notes about the MUFON Casebook Report before summing this case up. In post #35 above, I went through the sightings that happened around 6:00pm-7:00pm on 1/8/208 within 30+ miles of Stephenville. The report refers to these as "the early sightings".
As for the later sightings, I'll just touch on a few. Again, this report is not copiable, so I have to use screen shots making it difficult to just get the important parts.
First up is witness "H", who I can't really get a grasp on what she is seeing. And I'll veer off a bit here to explain why I think this is.
With this report it's unclear exactly what these witness testimonies are. The report claims that MUFON obtained 17 reports from witnesses and that they used 8 of them for this report. It doesn't make it clear WHEN they got these reports. It may be that many of them were obtained AFTER this story had gone public. The best I can tell, nowhere in this report are we getting what these witnesses reported THAT NIGHT. That is, these are not the recordings or transcription of what people reported to the MUFON reporting website or hotline. Rather, the witness testimony presented here is the result of MUFON investigators following up with the witnesses AT A LATER DATE. Whether days, weeks or longer is unclear.
This can be important, because as noted above and I'll reiterate below, witness "B", almost certainly Steve Allen who I would suggest is the real impetuous behind this whole story, got his version into the newspaper by the next day or so. From there it got on the TV news. The witnesses are tainted. They saw some lights and then in news those lights are attributed to a mile x 1/2 mile (1600m x 800m) UFO.
As I noted in the other post, I think MUFON reporting is inherently self-selecting, those who are compelled to report lights in the sky to MUFON, tend to think lights in the sky are UFOs (alien). Here we have people that think to report lights to MUFON on the evening of 1/8 and within a few days there are news stories confirming that there was in fact UFOs that night. So, we have whatever these witnesses saw, or thought they saw, on 1/8, the report they may have made to MUFON, then the news accounts based mostly on Allen's testimony that get all jumbled together. Then along comes a "highly trained" MUFON field investigator at a later date to record what the witness NOW thinks they saw.
As a result we get this from witness "H" (sorry about the long description, but again screen shots):
Let me know if anyone can figure this out. She's below a hill driving along towards the hill it seems. Then she sees the lights that were close enough to make her head for the shoulder of the road, which in Texas is to the right. Then she says the lights were "were slightly to the right of being directly in front of her". Sounds like she steered towards them and not away.
She thought they were planes about to collide, but then thought they were stationary. Huh? They looked like school bus lights. All of this sounds like the lights are in front of here, at least enough so that she headed for the shoulder of the road. But then, no, the lights are less than 1/2 way up in the sky. Above the hill in front of her?
All of the witness statements in this report are like this. There is all this jargon about "degrees of the sky" and other stuff, but the basic narrative is missing. It sounds to me like this lady was driving along, maybe not paying attention, when she saw 2 red UFOs break lights at the top of the hill in front of her and panicked. After proceeding along the vehicle with the break lights drove over the hill and disappeared.
Notice what she DID NOT see is a 1 mile x 1/2 mile craft moving between 0 and Mach 2.
Moving on, witness "I" saw some lights. He thought there were 5 that turned on and off, but never saw more than 2 at once:
Witness "J", the local constable saw some lights. He had no reference but "felt" that some were 300' high and others were 5000'. He saw no craft with his binoculars:
Finaly witness "K" &"L", a former Air Traffic Controller and his wife who saw 2 lights while walking across the street at around 9:30pm. He notes that he could NOT estimate the size and didn't know how far away they were, then goes on to say they were really BIG:
As with the earlier sightings, the authors then proceeded to cherry-pick various bits of radar hits and possible false hits in an attempt to corollate the sightings with radar. I'll repost James McGaha opinion on this from @MonkeeSage post above:
These raw data contain 2.5 million points of noise and scatter. MUFON’s report selected just 187 of these points to contend that radar had tracked a huge “object” at least 524 feet in size, traveling near the Western White House (the Bush ranch, which is fifty miles southeast of Stephenville). “MUFON’s radar analysis is nothing more than cherry picking the 187 targets out of 2.5 million points of noise and scatter to make a track moving forty-nine mph for over one hour,” says [James] McGaha. “This analysis isabsurd!”
We could go on about possible explanations, but what's obvious even in the MUFON Casebook report is that there was a lot of F16 activity that evening in the training area near Stephensville, likely supervised by an AWACS plane. The obvious solution is lots of people saw lots of F16 activity and misunderstood it. But that's not what the canonical version of this story is about.
To sum up:
An unknown number of people likely saw some heavy military activity in the skies on 1/8 along with the normal amount of air traffic.
An unknown few people reported to MUFON including witness "B", Steve Allen.
Steve Allen contacted the local paper the following day or 2 and reported lights and a UFO that was 1 mile x 1/2 mile, a story the paper ran with.
Sometime later MUFON obtained 17 witness statements, 8 of which were used in their report.
Of the 8 statements in the report, only "B" (Allen) claims the craft to be 1 mile x 1/2 mile.
Most of the other 8 statements include various versions of "lights in the sky" with none really claiming to see a "craft".
MUFON uses the 8 statements, and probably following Allen's lead, look for radar hits of big unknown craft moving between 0 and Mach 2 in the general area of Stephensville.
MUFON presents a number of cherry-picked unknown radar hits that may or may not correspond to some of the witness's statements.
MUFON asserts possible government cover up and alludes to "activity near the Western White House" in a seeming ohmage to the Eisenhower meets the aliens trope.
Steve Allen goes on TV in 2021 claiming that he has spoken to "100s" of people in and around town that all saw what he saw.
The Stephenville UFO case now has a canonical version of the story, that is in no way backed up by the evidence, even the problematic MUFON Casebook Report.
It seems much of this story originates with Steve Allen and he has kept it going. He is the one that says the craft was 1 mile x 1/2 mile and bigger than a Walmart. He is the one that says "100s" of people all saw the same thing. He's the one that got it going in the press then and now. It seems @ideamug brought this case up and then left it, not sure what he was looking for.
