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:
External Quote:
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!"
https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/01/22164446/p56.pdf
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.