Beam me up before the nuts get here!
It’s deja vu or so it seems in Stephenville, Texas, a north central Texas town that has been getting a lot of national attention lately because of a spate of UFO sightings. Just as the military disputed claims related to UFO mania in Roswell, N.M., so is the military now correcting themselves concerning the Stephenville sightings.
The Air Force now says it was mistaken when it said their jets had not been flying in the vicinity of Stephenville UFO sightings. A story written by Angela K. Brown, one of the best Associated Press correspondents in Texas that I can recall, reported the Air Force decided to come clean “in the interest of public awareness.”
Still, a lot of folks around Stephenville, located in the middle of the state’s largest dairy producing area, don’t think the objects they saw were military planes. Some even initially said Air Force jets had been chasing the unidentified objects.
After I first heard about this story I wondered if perhaps the UFOs being seen were not really new aerial surveillance methods being carried out over dairy farms by their downstream neighbors in Waco.
In a saga with which I have more familiarity than I ever really wanted to, dairy farms in the Erath County area were blamed in part for polluting the North Bosque River which feeds Lake Waco downstream. That lake supplies drinking water for Waco and the surrounding area. Dairy waste which finds it way into the river via rainfall runoff dumps phosphorus into the river which in turn causes great blooming algae that makes Waco drinking water taste and smell like a herd of goats.
The city of Waco has fought the dairy industry as well as individual farms through lawsuits and overflights in helicopters during which aerial photos have shown environmental infractions by certain dairies.
So maybe it’s just a new tactic by Waco against the dairies. But probably not.
Speaking of Waco and flashes from the past, I notice in one of the local Stephenville daily’s stories are quotes from self-proclaimed “UFO expert” Jason Leigh of Cleburne, Texas.
Leigh first came to my attention on a cold, windy day in 1998 when I lived in Waco. Early on a Sunday morning Leigh drove his Jeep through the glass doors of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Regional Office near downtown Waco and told police he had possession of C-4 explosives. He finally came out that night after a standoff of about 16 hours with only a long gun and no bomb material. Leigh finally was sent for awhile to a federal prison that specialized in “mental health.”
Ah the memories. It’s great to know that the more things change, the more they remain things.