'Different than anything' resident had ever seen

Hundreds meet with UFO experts to discuss sighting

By TARA DOOLEY

DUBLIN — James Huse came to state nothing but the facts. The theories would have to come later, he said.

So in pursuit of the truth, Huse traveled the few miles down the road from his home in Stephenville to the Rotary Club meeting hall in downtown Dublin on Saturday to tell this story:

On Jan. 8, shortly after dark, he was walking two house guests to their car near Stephenville's main square when he beheld a red glowing light moving slowly across the sky. He pointed up at the sky and said: "UFO."

"I know what an airplane looks like," the 53-year-old retired electronics technician said. "I know what a helicopter looks like. This wasn't an airplane or a helicopter.

"This looked different than anything I had ever seen," he added.

That was the gist of what Huse told the investigators from the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, at the Saturday gathering, he said.

It was a story, told in multiple versions, to investigators from the nonprofit group that calls itself "dedicated to the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity."

The MUFON investigators rode into Dublin, a city famous as the home of a Dr Pepper museum and plant. Their goal was to look into the ruckus that has thrust this cowboy country of small towns and big skies into the international limelight.

Armed with a three-page questionnaire, investigators probed the memories of witnesses in one-on-one interviews.

"We are trying to get to the bottom of the mystery," said MUFON's Texas director, Ken Cherry. "We approach it from a scientific method and let the chips fall as they may."

The mystery unfolded with stories like Huse's.

Before Saturday's gathering, dozens of people had filed reports with the group, Cherry said. Most told of an unidentified object seen between 6:15 p.m. Jan. 8 and 4 a.m. the next day.

At the Dublin Rotary Club building, about 200 possible witnesses told their tale, Cherry said. It was many more than could be handled with the 50 copies of the questionnaire that MUFON members had brought with them.

The hall — normally filled with revelers for events such as the annual Dr Pepper, St. Patrick's Day and homecoming celebrations — was packed with about 500 people. Some of them were witnesses; others were curious area residents, some wearing aluminum foil hats and T-shirts proclaiming Stephenville the UFO capital of the world.

They were all stuck behind a semi-circle of television cameras and reporters flanking Cherry and Steve Hudgeons, assistant state director.

Hudgeons started off the meeting by defining UFO. "It means unidentified flying object," he said. "It does not mean spaceship from outer space."

Indeed, the group does not pretend to have a handle on alien technology, said Robert Powell, a director of research for MUFON who came from Austin to help the investigation.

The trick of such an investigation is to weed out the nuts and the folks who saw sights easily explained with an airplane flight schedule. The rest are occurrences that might just turn out to be unexplainable, he said.

"You want to get down to the real cases," said Powell, a real estate broker.

For Powell, the aluminum-covered heads in the room lacked a certain respect for the field. He said he got into it to study the phenomenon scientifically.

"It's an unknown that has the potential to be solved," Powell said.

MUFON's conclusions will not be ready for months, if not a year, Cherry said. They will likely be published first in the group's newsletter.

If Huse was sticking to the facts Saturday, Sean Kiel had a theory.

Kiel, 42, said he saw a bright ball of light passing across the sky at dusk on Jan. 8. He was somewhere between Weatherford and Cisco, driving his regular trucking route. A resident of New Haven, Ky., Kiel came to Dublin for the meeting with photos of the light saved on his cell phone.

He doesn't know for sure, but he believes the photos show some kind of military aircraft.

Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't a UFO in one sense of the phrase.

"It was a UFO," he said. "I couldn't identify it."