Pilot Says He Can Explain Stephenville UFO Sightings

By NBCI.com
1-16-08

FORT WORTH, Texas -- A Fort Worth medical helicopter pilot said he knows what caused the strange lights that appeared in the sky near Stephenville last week.

Chuck Mueller was flying a medical helicopter from a Fort Worth hospital, heading south just after sunset last Thursday. He said he saw unusual lights on the horizon near Granbury.

"We were maybe five minutes into the flight when we saw the lights come on, one little orange light, and then another one and another one in sequence across the sky," he said.

His description is similar to what a county constable and dozens of others in Stephenville had described seeing two nights earlier.

"And it was something that I'd never seen before," Mueller said. "And I looked at the medic and he looked at me, and we were like, 'What was that?'"

Muller, a former Army pilot in Iraq, said an explanation "kind of hit" him.

"I'll bet that was an airplane dropping flares, dispensing flares as he was flying along," he said. "It all makes sense. The color was right."

Stephenville is close to the Brownwood Military Operations Area, a major training area for fighter jets.

Other witnesses said they would like to believe Mueller's theory, but it doesn't answer all of their questions.

"But it doesn't explain these little lights," Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan said. "And then the thing about it is just the speed."

They said the lights zipped across the sky at lightning speed.

"An airplane can't do that," Gaitan said. "A helicopter can't do that."

An Air Force spokesman at Fort Worth's Joint Reserve Base said there were no military planes at all in the area last Tuesday.