Stephenville, Texas
32°13′N, 98°12′W — Erath County, North Central Texas — small city southwest of Fort Worth
What's documented
Stephenville is a small city in Erath County, Texas, population ~21,000. On the evening of 8 January 2008, multiple residents reported a very large luminous object moving silently over the area at low altitude. Witnesses included a pilot, a police officer, a city constable, and the owner of a local machine shop. MUFON investigated the case; in subsequent FAA radar analysis, researcher Glen Schulze and journalist Robert Powell identified anomalous radar returns over the area on the evening in question.
Notable & intriguing
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MUFON's Glen Schulze and Robert Powell obtained FAA radar data via FOIA for the 8 January 2008 evening and identified an unidentified track moving at 532 mph toward Crawford, Texas — at that date, the location of President George W. Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch. The object passed within 10 miles of the ranch at 8:21 PM Central.
Schulze & Powell, 'Special Research Report: Stephenville, Texas' (MUFON, 2008)
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On 23 January 2008, the U.S. Air Force's 301st Fighter Wing at NAS Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base reversed its initial statement that no military aircraft had been over Erath County on 8 January, and acknowledged that ten F-16s from the 457th Fighter Squadron had in fact been operating training flights over the area.
Stephenville Empire-Tribune, 23 January 2008
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Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan provided sworn testimony to MUFON that the object he observed was approximately a half-mile long, silent, with flashing strobe-like white lights covering its underside.
MUFON case file 14159, January 2008
Public-record imagery
