UFOs in Bay City?

By Judy Triplett
Bay City Tribune

Published January 21, 2008

A recent Associated Press news story about UFOs sighted in Stephenville was a comfort to Joyce Black in Bay City.

Now she knows she is not alone.

Black said that she saw bright lights from her patio that were similar to the ones described by witnesses who saw lights in the sky around Stephenville.

“I was glad to know other people have seen something,” Black said. “It has been bothering me since last October, wondering what in the world was that.”

According to the AP story, which appeared in the Houston Chronicle on Jan. 15, several dozen people near Stephenville in West Texas saw a “large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast.”

Black said that she and her husband were outside on the patio of their home in the 1900 block of Park Avenue one evening in August and again in late October when they saw “a group of flashing lights.”

The group of lights were “hovering in the sky…then all of a sudden they moved so quickly.”

The lights were not a helicopter, she said, because “a helicopter can’t move that fast.”

The lights were not an airplane, either, she said.

“Airplanes don’t hover.”

The speed of the movement was what made her realize she didn’t know what she was seeing, she said.

“It darted off like a rocket. It was there, then it was gone.”

She called police to see if any one else reported seeing anything and was told by the dispatcher that no other calls had come in.

“I would like to know what it is,” Black said.

The story intrigued her so much that she called Stephenville Empire-Tribune’s reporter, Angela Joiner, who originally wrote about the sightings there.

“She said she’s been getting calls from all over,” Black said.

Science students at Stephenville’s high school plan to create and sell T-shirts about the sightings as a fund-raiser for the science club, according to the newspaper’s Web site.

In an Empire-Tribune online poll, “Do you believe in UFO’s?”, a whopping 57 percent of the responders voted yes, 28 percent voted maybe and only 15 percent voted no.

Black doesn’t know if what she saw was otherworldly, but she said that it was strange.

“I’m just trying to find out what the lights are.”