They want to believe.
In the new Steven Spielberg-produced Netflix documentary, “Encounters,” now streaming, there was an eye-popping number of witnesses to one of the UFO incidents.
For five months after October 2007, more than 300 locals near Stephenville, Texas, reported seeing a large “delta shaped” UFO.
Witnesses all reported it to be enormous – some estimates said it was a mile-long, others claimed it was the length of 17 football fields.
Various witnesses said they saw it hovering around with lights.
The most widely publicized incident was on January 8, 2008, when 19 witnesses alleged that they saw the UFO as it passed west from Dublin, Texas, to Stephenville, pursued by US military fighter pilots.
The mass sighting made national news in 2008. Coverage of it appeared in ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, CBS News and on National Public Radio.
Robert Powell, the nanotechnology engineer whose investigation helped document the large UFO via Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radar data, appears in the doc.
“It was like a circus,” Powell told the Daily Mail.
“We were interviewing various witnesses — it was so loud that you couldn’t even interview them properly,” Powell recollected. “The key witness interviews occurred outside of that.”
Local reporter Angelia Joiner broke the story for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune. This eventually cost Joiner her job with the newspaper. She died of Covid in 2021, but Powell said, “She felt that she owed it to the citizenry to give them answers. They knew these weren’t F-16s [fighter jets] because F-16s would fly over every day of the year, constant, nonstop. So, they knew what F-16s look like.”
He continued: “So, they would call her and say, ‘Well, what have you found out? Has anyone else reported it?’ Blah, blah, blah — and she felt obligated to answer their questions.”
He said she “got a little disillusioned’ as years went by, because “there’s so many wackos in this field that will contact you and tell you, you know, they’ve got a piece of a UFO or what-have-you.”
Powell worked with Glen Schulze, a career electrical engineer, to analyze radar. From their studies, they were able to conclude, “Then the object moved at about 2100 mph.”
Another witness, a former air traffic controller who allegedly saw the giant UFO evading USAF fighter jets, compared the military planes to the large object “as raisins to a grapefruit.”
“Encounters” is just the latest project from Spielberg’s longtime fascination with UFOs and extraterrestrials, which has included “E.T.,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “War of the Worlds” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
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