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COPYRIGHT 2008 Texas Monthly, Inc.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
On the afternoon of January 9, Ken Cherry, the 61-year-old owner of a prosperous Tarrant County securities firm, was sitting in his home office, studying various stock market reports flitting across his computer screen, when line two rang. Line one is devoted to customers and brokers. Line two is the UFO phone.
Cherry is the Texas state director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the country's oldest and largest UFO investigation group. He supervises a staff of 41 certified MUFON investigators in the state. These men and women spend their free time interviewing people who have written in to the MUFON Web site or called one of its numbers claiming to have seen a UFO. In an average month, the Texas chapter of MUFON receives between fifteen and twenty such reports. Most of them sound like what Cherry heard on January 9:
A woman outside Stephenville, seventy miles southwest of Fort Worth, said she and her teenage son had seen some flashing lights in the sky the previous evening. Cherry asked a few questions and hung up. Since the woman had described seeing the lights for only a few seconds, he didn't figure this would be anything other than a typical sighting.
Then line two rang again. A Stephenville man was calling to say that he had seen something strange the night before: a single bright light hovering over the treetops near his home. Curious, Cherry logged in to the MUFON Web site, where he saw several reports waiting for him, all from residents of the Stephenville area who had seen strange lights on the night of January 8. The next day, Cherry read a front-page story in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune about four more area residents who had seen something in the sky on January 8. One of them was Steve Allen, the president and owner of a trucking company in the nearby town of Glen Rose. Allen also happens to be a licensed pilot, comfortable...
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