Fringe-ology (18 page)

The implication that the witnesses could have deluded themselves by looking into an average Texas night sky is clear. But an absence of ground lighting, allowing the stars to appear in greater relief, would only seem exotic to a city dweller. Like, say, a writer from the
Los Angeles
Times
. In central Texas, these vaulted skies, these jet black canvases, are simply called “night.” And as it turns out, there is good reason to think that on January 8, 2008, the people of Stephenville really did see something in the skies over their town.

The radar data ultimately published by MUFON, in fact, suggest one object traveled at varying speeds across the region for about an hour, hovering or moving at less than 60 mph most of the time, but occasionally accelerating to speeds more than 500 miles an hour. Whatever it was, it flew without a transponder—meaning it wasn't official air traffic, and if it
was
military, it didn't particularly want to be tracked. The data in the MUFON report also included another pair of radar hits corresponding to the testimony of several ground witnesses, including Allen, that suggested an object was flying at about 2,000 miles per hour.

Of course, this too has been explained away by skeptic James McGaha, who told
Popular Mechanics
he thought some kind of “radar scatter” was responsible for the entire data trail MUFON found. “They had a huge amount of data,” McGaha said, “and they just pulled a few bits of information out of it and drew a line.”

I interviewed Robert Powell and Glen Schulze, the men responsible for the MUFON report. They point out a couple of things to undermine McGaha's criticisms: one, multiple eyewitnesses corroborate the data they got from the radar reports. Further, the kind of “scatter” McGaha was talking about reveals itself: “With scatter,” says Schulze, a retired radar operator, “you'll see the radar makes its sweep, in a circle, and when it gets a false ping there are multiple supposed returns, all around each other. The data you're looking at tells you these are false hits. This wasn't like that at all. This was one clear path, traveling over an hour, in the same direction, at a consistent speed, with one hit per sweep. This was like a clear track in the snow.”

Further, Schulze and Powell took a close look at the data yielded by the towers that produced those key hits, looking for standard signs of malfunction in the hours before and after the sighting. They found none.

Again, this doesn't mean the source of the Stephenville Lights was extraterrestrial. But it does suggest that the witnesses saw
some
thing real and solid enough to yield consistent radar returns. And whatever it was, the fallout was real enough for the people of Stephenville.

Joiner quit her job at the newspaper. The marching orders coming out of the city's meeting to reject a new, UFO-based identity included a call for the newspaper to back off the story. The
Empire-Tribune
's publisher is said to have attended the meeting. And really, on a journalistic basis, I can't blame the newspaper brass for tacking back toward normalcy. Small-town newspapers stay relevant by covering the
small
stuff, not by investigating military cover-ups or interstellar travel. Joiner, however, felt returning to her beats would leave the witnesses twisting uncomfortably in the wind. “They still wanted answers,” says Joiner. “And they had come forward because they trusted me. So I wanted to get those answers, too.”

She left the paper and started running a UFO-related web site and podcast. She is also pursuing a book-length treatment of the Stephenville Lights.

Gaitan paid a price of sorts, too, at least for a time. The county constable spent many long nights driving all over the countryside, trying to catch a glimpse of the craft again before he realized he needed to get ahold of himself. “It was just taking up too much of my time,” he told me. “I had to shut it down.”

Though his Facebook page lists
UFO Magazine
among the products he recommends, Gaitan is no longer driving around, looking for weird lights.

The fallout includes the whole town, to some degree. Mistrust lingers between local residents and the Air Force personnel in charge of the Brown-wood Military Operations Area. Mark Murphy, a city councilman at the time, says he had it out with personnel at the Air Force base. “It was, like, two weeks, we were seeing jets and helicopters over the town, day and night. I called them. They said they weren't doing anything out of the ordinary. That's crap.”

In Murphy's estimation, the whole episode was some exercise conducted by the military. “I certainly have no proof it was extraterrestrial,” he said.

And then there was Ricky Sorrells.

Joiner proved instrumental in getting me together with Sorrells, who doesn't plan on giving any more interviews. The initial wave of publicity was difficult. After he drew all that attention to himself, he says, military copters and F-16s flew over his property at odd hours. Then he got a phone call from a man identifying himself as a lieutenant colonel who wanted to meet with him. When Sorrells hesitated to agree, the man reacted angrily, insisting on a meeting. Sorrells advised the man not to cross his perimeter fence. “If you are who you say you are,” said Sorrells, “why don't you quit flying in the airspace over my property?”

“It's my airspace,” the man replied. “But I'll quit flying my helicopters overhead, if you quit talking about what you saw.”

Sorrells didn't commit to keeping his mouth shut. And he never did meet with the lieutenant colonel. But not long after that conversation, he woke up to the sound of his dogs barking.

It was around 1:00
A.M
.

He went to the window and saw a man standing on his property, staring at his house through a steady rain. Sorrels grabbed a rifle he keeps in his bedroom and, without waking his family, went to the backdoor. The man stood forty or fifty feet away, between Sorrels's car and pickup truck. The man wore a heavy parka. But Sorrells couldn't make out any detail in his face or clothing that would have specifically identified him as a member of the military. The man's face seemed to be angled directly toward the window Sorrells was looking out from, however, and Sorrells felt sure the man had spotted him.

He wanted to open his back door but felt like he'd be at a disadvantage. The man across from him had plenty of cover. Ricky would have been an easy target, if that's what this was about. The pair stood in those same positions for many long seconds. The man rocked back and forth slightly on his heels in the rain, biding his time. Then he slowly turned and departed.

In the morning, Sorrells went outside to look around. He found the man's footprints. And he also found something else: a bullet, right where the man had stood. The bullet was just sitting there on the open ground, flecked with mud from the rain. Sorrells took the visit as a further warning.

I met Sorrells, Joiner, and her husband in a Mexican restaurant and had a couple of beers. Today, Sorrells isn't the UFO witness we usually see in media caricatures. He isn't waiting for the space brothers to make life on planet Earth better, or the reptilians to land and destroy us all. He is in fact a reluctant, regretful witness. “I wish I'd never seen it,” he told me. “Whatever it was, I wish I never did look up.”

Which is, of course, how he ended up at Gaitan's door.

“It got pretty bad for me for a while,” says Sorrells. “I didn't really know what to do.”

During this period of crisis, however, a man made contact with both Sorrells and Joiner. The man coached them on how to deal with these strange events and became someone Sorrells could feel comfortable talking to about his sighting. Neither Joiner nor Sorrels would reveal anything about this mystery man, who wants to keep his own identity a secret. And as a result, I can make no guesses as to whether he is retired or active military, a cool, old, beer-drinking dude, or an imp from the Seventh Dimension. But Joiner's husband, Randell, showed me some of what they've learned, if not from this suspicious mister, then from the whole experience—about how to maintain a sense of humor in the face of uncertainty and how to take the cultural expectations of outsiders and use them like a shield. “You know, we aren't the kinds of people who would ever think about things like UFOs,” he told me. “This is Texas. We think about things like football, barbecue . . . and steers!”

He smiled at me the whole time, out from under the brim of his cowboy hat, clearly playing with the way his town had been represented. Then he winked. And we ordered another round.

I
T IS
F
RIDAY NIGHT,
and the lights are on at the Yellow Jackets stadium, the church of high school football filling all the pews.

This is part of the life the town's leadership wanted to return to in rejecting the opportunity to become a UFO mecca. “It is a branding issue,” said July Danley from the Chamber of Commerce. “And there was a lot of talk in the community about maybe capitalizing on the sightings in some way. But it was decided that we like who we are. We like being the cowboy capital. We like what we have to offer, and we didn't want to change that.”

I learn a lot about Stephenville, and its aspirations, peering through the lens of the Yellow Jackets football game. The cheerleaders engage in some old-fashioned,
get that ball over the line
-style chants. And the crowd, five thousand strong tonight, shakes ball bearings inside oil and coffee cans whenever they want to make some noise—a local tradition. Timeouts are filled with folksy ads from the stadium announcer, urging people to visit some of the local barbecue joints and steak houses. And whenever any player stays down on the ground with an injury, players on both teams take one knee until the fallen player is brought to his feet.

I feel as if I'm looking back in time, to a version of life more closely associated with the 1950s than the new millennium.

I maintain a relatively low profile through the course of the game. There is a friendly old couple next to me, however, and as I tell them what brought me to town, I notice a mom a couple of rows back wrinkle her nose. She quickly leads her kids to another area to sit. No UFO talk for them.

The old couple just laugh, a bit darkly. “The UFO's not our favorite thing,” the old woman, Linda, says. “We know some of those people, and I believe they saw something unusual, but . . .”

Her voice trails off there. She clearly doesn't want to say too much. Beside her, her husband smirks the whole time.

“You don't believe it?” I ask.

“I didn't say that,” he said. “It's just . . .”

He breaks off and makes a fluttering motion with his hands: “Who knows?” he says.

“It's a little silly,” suggests Linda. “The attention. No one knows what they saw. I tend to think it was military.”

Her husband nods more emphatically at this than ever.

“They didn't come out with the truth at first, about the jets,” she adds, “and believe me, people around here, we know jets. I think whatever it was, they were involved somehow and maybe they were into some experiment. But those people, they didn't make it up. I believe they saw something.”

In her cold appraisal of the military's behavior, I think, she alighted on one of the most important aspects of the Stephenville sighting. But it is in her regard for the witnesses that I believe we can all most readily learn something.

The truth is, we don't have to treat the so-called paranormal the way we do. We don't need to bathe in it with the believers, or strenuously deny its existence, like the skeptics. And we don't have to turn the whole thing into a fight. The people of Stephenville seem to have struck up a bargain among themselves, in which the believers go on believing, and the skeptics go on being skeptical. Either way, on Friday night, just the same, they all go watch the Yellow Jackets play football.

I talked to dozens of people in Stephenville, if not a hundred—random people in stores and on the street. Some decided they would rather not talk about the UFO. But when they did talk, when they
did
offer me their opinions, I never heard a whisper of judgment creep into their voices. I never heard anyone called a name, never heard anyone else's point of view dismissed outright.

Was that some show of solidarity they put on for the reporter from Philadelphia? Maybe. In some instances, yeah. Might have been. But if that's the case, let the show go on.

Stephenville has made a decision, publicly, to let the unknown stay just that. And they have further chosen not to let their own collective identity be shaped by an enigma. This is not to say that life goes on here as it always has. The people here are warier than before. The mayor never did return my phone calls. Some people wouldn't speak to me at all. The Stephenville Lights did make Stephenville, Texas, a
different
town—a town that has felt the heat of the nation's spotlight.

But that's okay.

A UFO flew overhead, and ever since, the people here have been doing the best they can to rise above it.

The Unexplained Noises That Fueled a Childhood Mystery

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

—Samuel Johnson

I
was about six years old when the trouble started, and I retain only fragmentary memories of what happened: I remember the sound, big and booming. To me, the noise suggested something was angry—and trying to break in through the roof. Once, I can remember, the sound woke me up out of bed. I shared a room with a big brother, Dave. He had already stood up and turned on the light. Our sisters were down the hall. We could hear them, hollering to us. But the booms seemed to come from the roof over our heads.

“What's happening?” I asked.

In response, Dave stared up at the ceiling and put his hands over his head—the way I'd found stressed adults sometimes did to keep their heads from, you know, popping off. “I don't know,” he said.

His voice sounded weak, enervated from his own sense of not knowing. The banging stopped for several long seconds. Then a particularly loud thump sounded, and for a moment I held my breath. I don't remember much else, except that eventually we all gathered out in the hall, like tenants turned out by flooding in our apartments.

My parents came up with a cover story for me, the youngest. And now I can see the ways they tried to give that story legitimacy. I had just got home from school, and my mother was in the front yard, talking to a neighbor, who knew of our trouble. “How's it going?” she asked. “Is it still happening?”

“It's still happening,” my mother responded, then looked at me: “Right honey?”

She smiled, still turned toward me: “There are raccoons that jump up and down on the roof!”

I went and found a hole in the ground. I called my mother and our neighbor to look. “It's a raccoon's footprint,” I said.

My sisters claimed worse things than banging. One suffered frequent, awful nightmares. Both claimed the covers were pulled from them at night—their sheets and blankets seemingly clutched away in unison, to fall on the floor in a heap at the foot of their beds; an old woman appeared in their bedroom and walked right through the door.

The banging started in 1975 and lasted for nine months, maybe a year, emanating from the roof and walls. Morning on the last day we ever heard it started strangely. My mother put on a dress and makeup on a Saturday morning, like she was going out for dinner. Then she explained that our parish priest was coming over, to bless the house. “We never got the house blessed when we moved in,” she said, lying to me about what was really going on. “So we're having him do it now.”

Father Crowley showed up maybe a half-hour later, sprinkling holy water in the corners and praying in Latin. I remember that vividly, but I recall only a few details of what happened that night. Mostly, I just remember being scared. And the thumping going on above me. I'll get back to that. But first, a little context is in order.

Looking back, we had what believers would refer to as a “classic poltergeist experience”—a spirit making itself known by either moving objects or making noise. Skeptics would likely hear this story and think our “trouble” emanated from malfunctioning water pipes and overactive imaginations. The impasse between these two conflicting views is such that, since college, I have told this story only rarely. “The Family Ghost,” as I call it, is a subject probably best kept to myself. I'm a reporter, after all, and my own professional credibility hinges on
my
reliability as witness. I have not a doubt in my mind that there might be some potential employers, down the line, who won't like this book, even if they never actually read it.

So, you might ask,
Why do this?

Of course, I asked myself that same question. And my response starts with something fundamental: I'm going to write about this, the Family Ghost, because these stories are with us, whether we like them or not.

S
INCE THE BEGINNING OF
recorded history, men and women have told tales of ghosts and hauntings and things, in our case, that went
boom
in the night. These events are, I'd argue, a part of who we are—if not as individuals, then certainly as a species.

Besides that, as a journalist, I adhere to a code of ethics that requires me to explain any personal connections I might have to the subject at hand. It just doesn't seem right for me to write a book about the paranormal without letting you know where I come from. Most of the events and places that colored my childhood have fallen away. My family stopped attending any regular organized religious services when I was twelve. I've moved more times than I can count. But I'm resurrecting the Family Ghost, so to speak, because as a society, we hear plenty of ghost stories from people who believe everything they hear, and from people who don't think anything labeled “paranormal” could be possible. I think it's time to hear one of these stories from someone who, no matter what he believes, is prepared to focus on what he knows. And folks, that ain't much.

Consider my own memories: every last one of them could be false. In one of the most famous studies demonstrating the unreliability of memory, 120 people who attended the Disneyland theme park were shown an ad in which Bugs Bunny was depicted. Then they were asked, “
Did you shake hands with Bugs Bunny when you attended Disneyland?
”

One third said yes, they had shaken hands with that wascally wabbit. Problem is, Bugs is a Warner Bros. character—not a Disney creation at all. So Bugs had never appeared in the park. The researchers had created a false memory in their subjects merely by suggesting the idea of this impossible meeting. In another study, researchers convinced half of the participants that they had taken a hot air balloon ride that never occurred.

The functioning of an adult's memory is suspect. But childhood memories are the most highly suggestible. The most famous example is given by psychologist Jean Piaget, whose 1951 book,
Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood
, includes the following passage: “I can still see, most clearly, the following scene. . . . I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station.”

Piaget believed in the reality of this event, which he had heard as fact, till he was fifteen years old, when it was discovered that his nanny had made the story up to get a reward. In setting out to write this chapter, then, I considered the testimony of everyone older than me more reliable. And I further considered the collective picture they presented to be more important than individual accounts. In sum, when they agreed on the details I granted those details more validity.

In that sense, the Family Ghost story sails right past Piaget's kidnapping. The accounts of the close witnesses agree on the details related so far, for instance.

Over the years, as I mulled over whether or not to ever write about the episode, I had conversations with my older siblings, parents, and some other relatives.

I spoke about it to my oldest brother, Jerry, in fact, the last time I saw him before he died. He recounted the basic particulars I describe but resisted searching his memory any further than this: lots of banging over lots of nights, more stories from our sisters, the appearance of the family priest. Then he confessed that he didn't want to talk about it at all. “I don't know why,” he said, multiple times, until finally he admitted, “It freaked me out.”

A cousin, and my aunt, still remember
hearing
about it. They learned some of the details as they happened—including the banging, and the bit about the blessing of the house. My other brother and my sisters retain their own memories. But for our purposes, the most detailed account came from my parents, who were charged with figuring it all out. Shortly after I graduated from college, many years before my mother died, I sat down with them and talked about the whole thing. And this is the story they told me.

The banging occurred only after midnight and seemed to respond to their actions: that is, when they came upstairs, it stopped. But if they came back down too soon, it started again. “Too soon” was never an amount of time they quantified. But they did develop some standards and practices. Any time the banging started, which they described as “booming” and “incredibly loud,” they took to spending an hour or more sleeping alongside us before going back to their own bedroom on the first floor.

It was not, as it were, an inside job. The kids were all accounted for, and under observation by each other during at least some of these episodes. The sound was loud and seemed to originate from the second-floor walls or ceiling, and we never succeeded in recreating it. It seems clear to me, anyway: this particular ghost story will not yield to a
Scooby-Doo
solution, the climax coming when that smart Velma tears the sheet off one of us.

My sisters shared stories with my parents of those more far-out paranormal happenings: the covers yanked from their beds, the woman who swept through their room. My parents agreed it was easier
not
to believe them. For one thing, the sound was the only strange experience they had encountered themselves. And, more pressingly, who wants to think their daughters are plagued by some paranormal force?

They dismissed my sisters' stories, then, and focused on the sound. Skeptics don't like to acknowledge this sort of thing, but not all believers
want
to think their house is haunted. My parents spent months, and more than a few sleep-deprived nights, looking for prosaic explanations: Each of us swore the banging sounded powerful, like someone trying to pound in through the roof or wall with a hammer. And yes, my parents briefly wondered if the source of the noise might be raccoons jumping on the roof. But more seriously, they wondered if it was some sound in the pipes. Many supposed hauntings can be explained by simple plumbing problems or the expansion of pipes inside the house's walls. Water hammers, or fluid hammers, typically occur when dishwashers, washing machines, or toilets suddenly stop the flow of water. When the water is shut off, there is a loud banging sound. All that energy in the flowing water needs some place to go and converts into acoustic energy. Though admittedly my parents' analysis was that of a middle-class couple, busy with the rigors of child rearing, they ultimately concluded the water or heating pipes couldn't be responsible: The sound happened at regular times, after midnight, as everyone slept, and this big, banging sound went on longer and louder, every time it occurred, than any plumping problem with which they were familiar, including the water hammer.

Eventually, feeling they had run out of potential prosaic explanations, and tired of the phenomenon, which often interrupted a precious night's sleep, they settled on a paranormal possibility. They contacted the priest of the parish we attended. An appointment was set. Big Father Crowley entered, flicking holy water and saying prayers. And that night, things got even more surreal.

I talked to my parents about this whole episode maybe twenty years after it happened. I was staying with them in Florida briefly, after graduating college. They had retired there and I would be moving to the Northeast. We had eaten lunch, cleaned up the dishes, and sat back down at the table to talk. What struck me most was
this
part of the story, not only because the details were so outlandish, but because of the way they reacted to telling it. They had shared the same general account with me in the past, as had my brothers and sisters. But this was the first time I'd led them through the telling, in as much detail as they could remember. Looking back, it was my first post-grad reporting experience. I wanted to get past the history that had accrued in my own mind, having lived around the story for so long. And that required going straight to the sources closest to it. What I learned is that sometimes the
way
a story is told is as telling as the story itself.

W
E HAD STARTED OFF
our “interview” almost playfully. But maybe an hour in, when I asked them to walk me through the last night, the color drained from their faces. Their bodies seemed to grow heavier as they sagged forward in their chairs. Their voices lost volume and vigor. They seemed not just to be recalling the details but
reliving
them. They looked as gut-sick and scared as they claimed to feel that night. “We didn't know what was happening,” my father said. “And we didn't think we could stop it.”

So, what did happen?

Well, usually, when the banging started, we waited for them to come and comfort us. But that night the thumping was so loud, so encompassing, so threatening, that everyone congregated downstairs. The lamp over the dining room table swung, side to side, with the force of the blows on the house. (I have one additional memory of my mother hollering, to my father, “Jerry, the whole house is going to come apart!”)

My parents talked, briefly, about packing an overnight bag. They were going to take us to a hotel. And then, suddenly, something new happened. The noises shifted. For the first time ever, the banging lost its amorphous quality, and assumed a precise location. It hit upon the stairs.

Retelling the story, my parents fell quiet.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“We were so scared,” my mother said.