Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  “I checked you out on Google,” Frank Burke, a spirited old man, told me. “I saw the kind of stuff you wrote at your old job … the Philadelphia Weekly? You’re all right.”

  I’m not going to argue that the people of Stephenville qualify as technophiles just because they learned to use the Internets well enough to work the Google Machine. But I was impressed that they had gone deep into my history, beyond the magazine where I work now to my previous newspaper job, and that they used my clips on crime and politics and traditional journalistic subjects, to assure themselves, the UFO witnesses, that I wasn’t some kind of nut. And I note that if these are modern-day hicks, then hicks as we have ridiculed them simply do not exist in great numbers anymore.

  The majority of the media, however, seems to have missed this particular memo.

  After reviewing all the news accounts I could get my hands on, I’ve determined that the most telling, wrongheaded cheap shot to the people of Stephenville was ultimately delivered by a writer from the Los Angeles Times: “The night sky above Stephenville is a jet black canvas that seems the perfect backdrop for the sharp white specks of stars,” the Times’s subsequent article reads, “and any imaginings of strange glowing lights.”

  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 something 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 EmpireTribune’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 Brownwood 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 is
n’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.

  IT IS FRIDAY 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.

  Chapter 5

  Was There a Ghost in My House?

  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 suffer
ed 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.