UFOs Over Texas?

Off-Topic Off Topic
#1

UFO Buffs: Something ‘Definitely’ Happening In Stephenville
KXAS-TV
updated 7:59 p.m. ET, Sat., Jan. 19, 2008

DUBLIN, Texas - North Texans shared their stories of supposed UFO sightings at a meeting called by UFO investigators in Dublin. Dozens of people crowded into Dublin’s Rotary Club to talk with the Mutual UFO Network, a group of UFO buffs.

Texas MUFON director Ken Cherry said the group “definitely” knows something is going on in Stephenville.

“In an extremely small number of cases will we get a mass sighting like this,” he said.

A woman from Brownwood brought a video of bouncing lights that she shot on Jan. 4.

“You can’t see through it,” Margie Galvez said. “You can’t see in it. It just bounces.”

She said she shot the video with an infrared surveillance camera at her farm.

“You can’t explain it,” she said. “I don’t know what it is.”

A Dublin man showed video of a strange object in the sky that he shot last summer in Stephenville.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “I want someone to tell me what it is.”

Most people didn’t have any pictures.

“What I saw was a very large blue light,” Cleburne resident Jason Greywolf Leigh said.

Stephenville resident James Huse said he saw big, round objects in the sky.

“I would estimate they were the size of an aircraft,” he said.

Glenda Jackson, another Stephenville resident, said she also saw something strange in the sky.

“It looked like two plates upside down, like a saucer,” she said. “It was at least as wide as a football field.”

The meeting also drew people who just wanted to see what the hoopla was all about.

MUFON members said their work could take a year. Even then, there may be no explanation for the phenomenon, they said.

The investigators said it was way too early to rule anything in or out. But with so many people coming forward, the group said it is convinced people saw something.

MSNBC

#2

Still no one has anything decent on video or a photo…after all these years.

#3

many people believe these UFO sightings to be secret government flight project, which is probably the most logical answer. I sure don’t think theres aliens hovering over Texas but i also think that if the USAF is stupid enough to fly a top secret project that close to a residential area, we’ve got bigger problems then extraterrestrials on our hands

#4

awwww, government, what are they covering up now or even inventing

#5

Well I am not sure about this 100% but I believe on a history channel special they said something about a certain object. It came from mountains and would hover for some distance, not for sure if it was huge. They also had a live image a saucer flying over Mexico City on tape from a person in a crowd. Man those people were busting their chops to get in to cover.

#6

“I saw forty of them flying in formation over New Mexico!” Dennis Hopper…Easy Rider.

#7

Solved?

Texas UFO Mystery Solved?
FORT WORTH (CBS 11 News) ―

The mystery of the Stephenville UFOs might have been solved.

Today the Air Force Reserve said on the night of January 8, ten F-16 fighter jets were conducting training flights in the area. Many of the suspected UFO sightings took place on that night.

Originally, the 301st Fighter Wing at the Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base said none of its jets were in the area that night.

In a statement today, a Wing spokesman says they made a mistake and that jets were flying in the Stephenville area that evening.

The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.

About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mostly in California, Colorado and Texas, according to the Mutual UFO Network, which plans to go to the 17,000-resident town of Stephenville to investigate.

Fourteen percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press and Ipsos say they have seen a UFO.

UFO sightings have been reported all over the world for centuries, including the infamous 1897 crash of a cigar-shaped object near the tiny Texas town of Aurora. While some thought it was a hoax, decades later investigators from UFO groups said evidence suggests the disfigured pilot’s body buried that day was an alien.

In Chicago in late 2006, some United Airlines pilots and other employees reported seeing a saucer-shaped craft hovering over O’Hare Airport before shooting up through the clouds. But federal officials said nothing showed up on the radar and explained it as some type of weather phenomenon.

In 1997, dozens of people saw lights in a V-formation over Phoenix, a mystery that was captured on videotape and spurred calls for a government investigation. A few months later people reported a similar sight over Las Vegas.

One of the most famous cases was the 1947 crash on a ranch near Roswell, N.M. Although the government said it was a top-secret weather balloon, an Army officer who helped recover the debris came forward 30 years later claiming a cover-up, asserting that an alien spacecraft had crashed. Reports later surfaced that a base nurse told someone that autopsies were performed on aliens from the wreckage.

(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

#8

The government says the same thing over and over, cant they just tell the truth

#9

I don’t think they can…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book

#10

Are there that many people in America called Bubba and Billy Joe driving pick-ups? :smiley:

And the answer is: Quite possibly.

Across the United States, Americans own approximately one pickup for every eight people.
http://www.desertexposure.com/200503/200503_continental_divide.html

That’s 12.5% of Yanks with pick ups against 14% having seen a UFO.

Spooky, isn’t it?:smiley:

#11

ah, america in all its modern glory! cure for cancer? Renewable energy source? Longer lasting lightbulb? nope were too busy looking for the “Thing” from Uranus

#12

Quiet. I have one. But I need it for the country. The locals will laugh at you if you are seen driving a hotrod down the two lane country road or pulling horses with it.

#13

Actually, one of the most famous “credible” UFO cases involves and Australian cargo pilot being trailed by huge object over the Pacific Ocean in 1979…

And is a pickup truck any more hickish than an eight cylinder Holden? :smiley:

#14

Wasn’t over the Pacific, but Bass Strait, which is where the ocean starts south of where I am.

Remember it well.

Never been satisfactorily explained if you believe in UFO’s, but experienced pilots tend to believe he was an inexperienced pilot with limited instrument flying experience and he just fell into the old problem of not believing his instruments and got disoriented and thought he was being chased by the moon or something. For those not familiar with it, there’s lots of stuff on it on UFO and other sites. http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=valentich+ufo&meta=

What’s a lot more impressive was the film by a TV crew following Valentich’s disappearance, which deserves more attention than Valentich’s disappearance because of the experienced air crew and ground staff and radar verifications of the unexplained objects. I remember seeing it at the time and not seeing a satisfactory explanation. http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/x%20maccabee/3.html

And is a pickup truck any more hickish than an eight cylinder Holden? :smiley:

A classic (i.e. normally aspirated) GM V8 (308 ci only - 252 ci hardly worth casting ) may power a Holden Statesman of relative refinement for a gentleman (by Australian standards, both of refinement and gentleman ;)) in its sedan form or, in its lesser utility configurations, a basic carriage for our finest hicks, as in the following link, although many of our hicks have surprisingly succumbed to the lure of fuel injection and other things way beyond the ken of true hicks. http://images.google.com.au/images?hl=en&q=ute+muster&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

These utes reach their full hick mating potential at B&S balls, where circle work is prohibited but universally undertaken with great enthusiasm. http://groups.msn.com/NSWBSBallConnection/ Wander through that site to see Australia’s finest, at their finest, for example down the left column on the home page as well as featured collections like http://groups.msn.com/vicbsballconnection (See if you can spot tankgeezer in one of the photos :slight_smile: )If you don’t feel like marrying some of those sheilas, who are dead set goers, there’s something wrong with you. :smiley:

Any Yank sheila ought to go a bit damp in the gusset and get the wedding trembles when she sees quality husband material like this.

#15

LoL! nice pic.

#16

LOL I’ve read a little bit about Holden actually on Wiki. Interesting company, I was hoping that GM imports their performance version here along with the more pedestrian version of the new Saturn Astra (Holden HSV Astra VXR). But they probably won’t because GM/Saturn has no real vision…

Not much for pickups myself, though I once briefly owned a small Ford Ranger as a work truck…I’m more of the speed hick type…

As for UFO’s, I’ve always been ambiguous, but I think we can make a pretty good circumstantial case that at least some sightings are not pilot error and that there is in fact some hard evidence (Belgian Air Force radar intercepts from their F-16s) and reports independent of direct human sighting (the 1952 “heat inversions” over Washington, DC)…

I think even that Wiki link I provided on the USAF’s study on the subject called Project Blue Book goes a long way to raising a lot of questions…

Dr. Allen Hynek, who began with the project as a skeptic sort of turned into an “ambiguous believer” by the end of project and became quite jaded with it’s staff:

Hynek’s criticism

Hynek was an associate member of the Robertson Panel, which recommended that UFOs needed debunking. A few years later, however, Hynek’s opinions about UFOs changed, and he thought they represented an unsolved mystery deserving scientific scrutiny. As the only scientist involved with U.S. Government UFO studies from the beginning to the end, he could offer a unique persepective on Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book.

After what he described as a promising beginning with a potential for scientific research, Hynek grew increasingly disenchanted with Blue Book during his tenure with the project, leveling accusations of indifference, incompetence, and of shoddy research on the part of Air Force personnel. Hynek notes that during its existence, critics dubbed Blue Book “The Society for the Explanation of the Uninvestigated”.[19]

Blue Book was headed by Ruppelt, then Captain Hardin, Captain Gregory, Major Friend and, finally, Major Hector Quintanilla. Hynek had kind words only for Ruppelt and Friend. Of Ruppelt, he wrote “In my contacts with him I found him to be honest and seriously puzzled about the whole phenomenon”.[20] Of Friend, he wrote “Of all the officers I worked with in Blue Book, Colonel Friend earned my respect. Whatever private views he may have held, he was a total and practical realist, and sitting where he could see the scoreboard, he recognized the limitations of his office but conducted himself with dignity and a total lack of the bombast that characterized several of the other Blue Book heads.”[21]

He held Quintanilla in especially low regard: “Quintanilla’s method was simple: disregard any evidence that was counter to his hypothesis.”[22] Hynek wrote that during Air Force Major Hector Quintanilla’s tenure as Blue Book’s director, “the flag of the utter nonsense school was flying at its highest on the mast.” Hynek reported that Sergeant David Moody, one of Quintanilla’s subordinates, “epitomized the conviction-before-trial method. Anything that he didn’t understand or didn’t like was immediately put into the psychological category, which meant ‘crackpot’.”

Hynek reported bitter exchanges with Moody when the latter refused to research UFO sightings thoroughly, describing Moody as “the master of the possible: possible balloon, possible aircraft, possible birds, which then became, by his own hand (and I argued with him violently at times) the probable.”

#17

You got the performance version (Monaro 5.7L) as the Pontiac GTO in 2004. All you need to know is here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn1Iip70c7Y

But it didn’t last. I think there were some safety issues in the US about OE tyres (tires for you ;)) and maybe something else. So Pontiac killed it. Maybe you can pick up a used one cheap.

For instance, Pontiac’s reborn GTO, which brought back to market one of the firm’s most fabled performance models, is once more being dropped.

“GTO has been a great vehicle, and it certainly epitomizes what Pontiac was in the past, is now and always will be in the future,” Mr. Hopson said. “We ran into some federal regulatory changes at the end of the 2006 model year that would require us to do some pretty substantial re-engineering of the components of the GTO.” The car is being discontinued because of tougher safety regulations.

The current model is based on the Holden Monaro, an Australian GM brand, and the architecture of that car is being phased out worldwide, Mr. Hopson added. “It didn’t make financial sense to spend resources on an architecture that was being phased out.”

But wouldn’t it make more sense to have the GTO in the lineup?

“I don’t think you will find anybody in Pontiac or GM saying otherwise. There are opportunities we are exploring. Rear-wheel-drive performance is something that we feel is part of Pontiac’s DNA. We will look at lots of opportunities as we move forward,” Mr. Hopson added.
http://www.pontiac.com/divisional/newsevents/news_g6.jsp?pageSection=8

As for the Holden GM history, it relates directly to WWII. We had no industrial capacity at the start of the war capable of mass producing cars etc, and none at the end, either. They were imported fully built or as components and built locally, with or without local components. The defence industry implications are obvious. So GM got a sweeet deal to set up in Australia because we needed the industrial capacity.

Automotive assembly in Australia dates from the 1920s when both
Ford and General Motors began to produce vehicles with imported chassis
and domestically constructed bodies. In the late 1930s the government
tried to induce an Australian-owned company to begin production of
engines, but action was forestailed by the war. When the issue was reopened in 1944, the government decided that a local automotive industry would need access to modern technology and, accordingly, sought out an overseas producer that would be willing to manufacture a car that would be
substantially Australian in design and content [27; 18, ch. 2; 12, pp.
753-56].

The offer accepted was that of General Motors-Holden’s. Although
the parent company refused to invest any additional capital in its Australian
subsidiary, the government arranged bank finance of 2.5 million dollars
and made other concessions in return for a guarantee to produce a model
with 90-95 percent local content. When the Holden was finally introduced
as the first Australian car in 1948, it proved to be an instant success that
restored American domination of the local auto industry. By 1959, GM-
H models, including the Holden, accounted for more than one-half of
total Australian sales, and British producers were well into the decline
that had virtually eliminated them from the market by the mid-1970s
[12, pp. 755-59; 27, pp. 27-28].

The government was able to induce General Motors to produce the
Holden because it made foreign exchange available to the firm and
eliminated tariff duties and sales tax on necessary imports of capital
equipment. Other firms that were not offered these concessions could not
have produced at comparable costs. Moreover, in the case of Ford and
Chrysler, exchange controls precluded substantial imports of cars or
components, thus leaving a large segment of the market largely free of
competition for the firm that had received the government’s blessing
Through its use of a mix of economic tools, the government was able to
generate foreign investment and local employment on a gratifying scale.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~business/bhcweb/publications/BEHprint/v012/p0109-p0123.pdf

#18

I know a guy that had one, very fun car. But they weren’t well received after getting some initial buzz as the style was considered a bit pedestrian…

As for the Holden GM history, it relates directly to WWII. We had no industrial capacity at the start of the war capable of mass producing cars etc, and none at the end, either. They were imported fully built or as components and built locally, with or without local components. The defence industry implications are obvious. So GM got a sweeet deal to set up in Australia because we needed the industrial capacity.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~business/bhcweb/publications/BEHprint/v012/p0109-p0123.pdf

Yeah, I just read that around that time GM also snapped up Opel (which they’re now finally using to get the Astra into the States). They even had to write is off after the Reich nationalized the company in 1940.

A lot of it has to do with gas prices, but we’re getting cars we probably would never have gotten with the fuel pump prices of six years ago. Cars like the Mazda5, Honda Fit, Nissan Versa, and the Toyota Yaris…

#19

have you ever noticed that its only ever the americans that see UFO’s? no? just me then! :slight_smile:

#20

No, UFOs are seen here in Oz, usually by drunken yobbos driving their Holden or Ford utes.:smiley:

Digger