Lights Over Dublin, Texas- 3/3/10

Lights are again seen in the skies over Dublin, Texas.  Here is the latest witness account, reported to MUFON.

MUFON Case # 22122
Date:    03/03/2010 19:40 CST
Location:    Dublin, Texas
Summary:    Four orange lights comprising the four corners of an inverted trapezoid. They blinked out individually.

(Depiction by SW)


Report:
I was standing outside in the courtyard of three portable buildings at Cottonwood Baptist Church, all covered by a separate steel-framed covering/roof. The buildings are positioned on the south, west, and north sides, with the east side being open. At approximately 7:40pm, I heard a long afterburner sound, probably 15 to 20 seconds worth. It sounded exactly like an F-16 engine, and I'm confident that it was not a twin-engined jet or a group of jets.

Approximately one minute later, I was on the east side of the courtyard facing west. I was watching the activity in the courtyard when something caused me to look up over the roof of the outbuilding to the west. I saw four orange lights forming the corners of an inverted trapezoid. The lights were of medium intensity, very similar to seeing an old streetlight in the distance. These lights did not seem connected, and as my eyes adjusted, I thought I saw stars between them, though I can't be sure because of the lighting around me at ground level.

When I first noticed them, I knew immediately that these were the lights that had been seen before from this same location around Thanksgiving. My wife and son along with several others had noticed the lights in the same position (west) in the sky during an outdoor fellowship meal.

The lights did not change position or intensity. Since I registered them as streetlamp-like lights, my mind guessed an altitude of 500 - 1,000 feet. The interesting thing about my vantage point is that there is a very narrow distance between the top of the outbuilding's roof and the steel-framed roof, limiting the combinations of altitudes and distances that these objects might have. If my altitude guess is correct, this would place the lights directly over the town of Dublin.

I had time to realize that I was seeing a light event, look for structure between the lights, and sense that there was none before they went out one by one - I believe that top left, lower right, top right, lower left was the order they went out in. They turned off in a manner consistent with a power source being removed, rather than the flickering or changing intensity associated with a burn-out event of a flammable object. The delay between one light going out and the next felt precise.
If you say "One and two and three and four" that's the time pattern they followed.

Because of the afterburner sound beforehand, I was completely convinced that this was a military operation from the moment I saw them. I immediately switched to looking for structure, and couldn't see any. After that, I mainly focused on the upper left light because it felt "closest", and I looked for structure around the light. No structure was detectable.

At 8:23pm, two military jets flew over, one to the west of the church, and one directly overhead. The one overhead registered as being at greater than 10,000 feet, and had just enough engine noise to make me look up and look for it. That was the last thing I saw in the sky before we left.

No one else around me at the time (7-8 adults, ~30kids) reacted, but I did find out that a couple of the girls in the kids group saw the lights as well. Within an hour of the event, after relaying the story to other adults, two different men told me that military jets and helicopters had been flying extremely low around the Stephenville and Hamilton areas in the preceding days. Of significance, there had been a very low flyover of the A&M Agricultural research facility at the corner of Hwy 281 and Hwy 8 (Lingleville Road). This location is approximately 12 miles north/northwest from the location of the sighting.

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Note: I live approximately 45 miles NNW from Dublin and at about the same time as this witness claims to have seen these lights, I also briefly witnessed distant lights over the general area of Dublin.  One moment I could just make them out, then they were gone.  I also noticed quite a bit of air traffic after this event. -SW

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