Fringe-ology (16 page)

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 fessed 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.

T
HERE 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.

I felt a bit uncomfortable, in light of this news, but asked anyway, about what I called “The Spider Web Theory.”

Edwards's family defended him and his sighting to me. But the truth is, their loved one's conversion experience has been convincingly undermined. Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist and a longtime supporter of the idea that aliens are visiting Earth, is the one who did the debunking. Maccabee told me he conducted an experiment after Edwards's story aired. He concluded the visual in Edwards's famous tape could be produced by a thin film of moisture on a spider web. At the right angle, in the right light, a single, nearby strand of spider silk, stretched taut across the sky, can look like a spaceship, thousands of feet overhead, the refraction of sunlight on water creating the illusion of strobing lights.

Because human perception can be so easily tricked, skeptics do some of their best work with UFOs. I urge all readers to take a look at the Rendlesham Forest case. It is long, colorful, and complicated. But the gist of it is that a UFO drifted about the forest surrounding a U.S. Air Force base in Britain. At one point, the base commander even lit off into the woods, trying to find the source of the strange light his men reported. He made an audio recording of his hunt, and skeptic Brian Dunning has since synced it, inserting a beep at five-second intervals. Sure enough, every five seconds, during the most dramatic section of the recording, the commander sees the mysterious light again. But as it turns out, five seconds is in fact precisely the time it takes for the nearby Orford Ness Lighthouse to make a complete rotation. The soldiers, Dunning argues, were fooled by light coming through the trees all right—from the Lighthouse.

Of course, skeptics don't always make their cases so impressively. In the wake of the Stephenville sightings, for instance, they proposed sundogs, flares, military jets, or even a rare “superior mirage,” even though the sight reported didn't match up with any of those explanations. At one point in our country's tortured UFO history, longtime debunker Philip Klass strenuously argued that some form of ball lightning could explain many UFO reports. Which is really funny. Because one of the more interesting corners of current science is the ongoing debate about whether or not ball lightning even exists. And here's one more for flavor: in the great flap of UFO sightings around Washington, D.C., in 1952, Klass clung to the explanation of a weather inversion, which can produce false radar hits. The problem for Klass was that the reports from D.C. included both radar evidence and multiple eyewitnesses. Worse, believers also trotted out their own equally credited investigators, who pretty convincingly argued that a weather inversion couldn't account for the radar data.

Just admitting that there is a kind of standoff in regard to the evidence, however, doesn't seem permissible for either side. So believers continue to point to D.C., 1952, as an E.T. fly-by. Skeptics call it all explained. And emotions, on that case and others, run hot. There is perhaps more personal enmity in this field than any other within the paranormal. Klass, in fact, left behind a “curse” (long) before his death: “To ufologists who publicly criticize me or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath THE UFO CURSE,” it reads. “No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. . . . As you lie on your own deathbed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.”

In turn, some in the UFO community cursed Klass's memory: “The world is better off without him,” UFOlogist William Moore was quoted in one pro-saucer newsletter. “My sainted grandmother told me not to say anything about the dead unless I could say something good. He's dead. Good!”

These examples are extreme, but indicative. The tenor of the UFO debate is generally embarrassing for everyone, and even the jokes are ugly. The combatants speak in their own language, like members of high school cliques: UFOlogists, as they like to be called, are dubbed “saucertards” practicing “pseudoscience.” And the skeptics are accused of being “in on the alien conspiracy” and denounced as “pseudoskeptics”!

But what leaps out at me is that the skeptics and the believers share one startling point of agreement: the vast, vast majority of so-called UFO reports can be convincingly identified as something altogether earthly. Of those that remain, there is either too little data to come to any conclusion, or the data are plentiful and the object remains . . .
unknown
.
The Condon Report.
Project Blue Book.
MUFON's own data. They all agree on this.

In the
sturm und drang
of debate, however, believers and skeptics just can't seem to let the unknown stay just and only that. And so, in cases where no clear answer exists, they continue the argument, each fighting for their points of view; and when the rest of us, without the same emotional investment in the debate, turn on the television and see a UFO report, we usually become witnesses, too: to the equivalent of Valium talking to mescaline—two seemingly inebriated factions engaged in a long-term war. My favorite illustration of this is when the skeptic James McGaha asked two UFO witnesses, during a
Larry King
appearance, “Are you
qualified
to look at the sky at night?”

I'm guessing he was wondering if either of them was an astronomer. But do we need an accredited university to
qualify
us to use our eyes after the sun sets? I believe there is a more profitable way to approach this topic.

A lot of great thinkers are on the record with the observation that the sudden flash of insight, the gut hunch, and the creative leap are what truly push science, and humanity, forward. Edward de Bono has spent the past twenty-odd years, in fact, traveling to fifty-two different countries and consulting with some of the world's largest corporations, including IBM and DuPont, teaching his concept of lateral thinking. Perhaps the foremost expert on the topic of creative thought, de Bono makes an argument that sheds an awful lot of light on our collective UFO problem.