UFOs: Sightings have been reported in Wichita Falls. Project Blue Book investigated one.
White triangles. Glowing white orbs. A cigar-shaped liquid object. And, of course, a disk.
These are all UFO sightings reported in Wichita Falls and documented over the years by the National UFO Reporting Center and, in at least one instance, by the Air Force initiative code-named Project Blue Book.
As for NUFORC, the nonprofit organization has been compiling UFO reports worldwide for 50 years — including from Wichita Falls.
The center's publicly accessible database contains 34 Wichita Falls incidents of what is now often dubbed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. The reports date back to 1989 and up to 2023. They are all listed as open.
UFOs are becoming more mainstream of late, and there's a drive to require the government to be transparent about what has been reported. Meanwhile, NUFORC's reports are posted online. The names of those making the reports are not included.
What did they see in Wichita Falls skies?
The oldest UFO sighting in Wichita Falls in NUFORC's database is listed for May 12, 1989.
"One sunny afternoon I saw a flat bottom thick gray disk slowly moving east," the resident reported.
They were sitting in their backyard, reading a book and facing west about 2:30 p.m. The resident lived six blocks from Sheppard Air Force Base's Missile Road north entrance gate.
Looking up, they saw "a light grayish silver object" about the size of a quarter at arms length. The object had a flat bottom and rounded edges. Moving slowly and wavering, it was traveling east directly over the base.
"There was no noise, no trail, or other characteristics. The neighborhood and base noises were lacking. I looked away and blinked my eyes in disbelief," the resident reported.
They looked again, but the object was gone. The whole strange incident lasted 60 to 90 seconds. The resident didn't report it to NUFORC until 2005.
CMOs or UFOs?
It's probably no surprise Sheppard is mentioned in more than one report, raising questions about the misidentification and misperception of military aircraft darting in the skies above North Texas.
In fact, NUFORC cautions against reporting commonly misidentified objects — CMOs in our parlance — such as Starlink satellites, rocket launches, Venus and Jupiter, and lens flares not visible to the naked eye that show up in photos.
And those pulsating objects seen in cell phone videos but not by anyone when the video was made? Those are from the cell phone's camera lens going in and out of focus.
Just sitting at a stoplight when . . .
Perhaps one of the stranger UFO reports from Wichita Falls describes a cigar-shaped object that appeared to be liquid and to emit other objects. It also had electrical or magnetic effects described by the man who made the report.
The incident in question was Aug. 10, 2007, and was reported to NUFORC about 90 minutes after the sighting.
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A man was sitting at a stoplight when he suddenly felt a vibration-like sensation, coupled with static electricity, all over his body.
"I look around my car first but saw nothing so I looked out the window and saw . . . a liquid like object hovering above my car," he reported. "It appeared as though I could see through it. It looked like heat radiating off hot pavement."
The man felt he was scanned during the estimated two-minute incident. The object quickly traveled east. The stoplight turned green and, scared to death, the man hurried home. He told his wife what happened. She found NUFORC online and thought he should report it.
A UFO interrupts stargazing
The latest Wichita Falls report online involved a three-to-five minute incident March 22 near Sheppard. It was reported to NUFORC about three days later.
A resident and their daughter were looking at the stars before bed when they saw an orb with an aura or haze around it. They were looking at the Little Dipper when one of its points moved.
"It was a glowing white orb. Nothing more," the resident reported.
The orb pulsed as it flew high across the sky and headed toward Lake Arrowhead. The orb stopped, turned and came back some. Then the orb appeared to stop and fade away.
Project Blue Book investigates
Before NUFORC, there was Project Blue Book. Through the initiative based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, the Air Force analyzed and probed UFO sightings from 1947 to 1969.
When the military shuttered it, there had been 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, including 701 unexplained incidents.
On Sept. 28, 1960, there were sightings in the Wichita Falls area of a brilliant ball of light falling noiselessly, prompting a Project Blue Book investigation.
About 4 a.m., witnesses spotted a ball — brighter than the usual falling star — for a few seconds southwest of Wichita Falls. It caused quite a stir in town.
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The afternoon newspaper, the Wichita Falls Times, ran a front-page story that day by Katricia Cochran. Two photographers from the competing morning newspaper, the Record News, were riding with Wichita Falls patrolmen in the early morning darkness.
"It was bright enough in the car to read a newspaper," photographer Dale Terry said in the article.
Project Blue Book took statements from several witnesses before reaching a conclusion about the blue or blueish white "glowing ball" that turned orange. The object seemed to disappear into the ground. Subsequent searches did not turn up anything.
Government documents about the incident are available in the National Archives in the Project Blue Book files, as well as online in Fold3's collections of historical military records.
Sightings were reported in Archer City, Vernon and Pampa in Texas, and in Lawton and near Burns Flat in Oklahoma. Witnesses, whose names were redacted, included an airman and an Air Force captain, a night watchman, Wichita Falls police patrolmen, a housewife, a truck driver and others.
The housewife told investigators that about 8:30 a.m. that day, she saw billowing material flowing through the sky while she stood on the balcony of her apartment. She caught a piece of the rubberlike material, and it shrank to the size of a quarter when she touched it.
The officer who filed the Project Blue Book report concluded the object sighted was probably an unusually brilliant meteorite that burned up in the atmosphere.
As for the material the housewife supplied for the investigation, it was possibly spiderwebs and not connected to the sighting. Still, a sample was sent to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis.
How a little green man appeared in Wichita Falls
At least one local UFO sighting has been confirmed and corroborated. It is not in the NUFORC database and didn't exist when Project Blue Book was active.
But you can drive by and see it anytime off Seymour Highway near Allen Road. Come Christmas, lights strewn on the saucer will likely be glowing to celebrate the season.
Its whimsical presence in the city is thanks to the owner of Greg Ciuba's Paint and Body and artist Joe Barrington. Ciuba just happened to spot the metal creation several years ago while driving through Throckmorton.
Barrington had thrown it together as a temporary marker for a high school art show. Ciuba purchased the impromptu artwork, and Barrington delivered it.
"He brought it to me hanging off the back of a winch truck," Ciuba said.
Ciuba added his own touch, a figure that stands under the metal sculpture.
"I just tucked that under there because it was green, and I thought, 'Why not?' " he said.
Trish Choate, enterprise watchdog reporter for the Times Record News, covers education, courts, breaking news and more. Contact Trish with news tips at tchoate@gannett.com. Read her recent work here. Her X handle is @Trishapedia.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Wichita Falls UFO sightings reported over the years, Project Blue Book
