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WASHINGTON - Put the alien theories on hold and get the men in black a cup of coffee. You know how they like it.
Some experts say it's possible that instead of little green men at the helm of Unidentified Flying Objects sighted in Texas skies the past two months, Air Force pilots could be secretly working out the kinks in the next U-2 spy plane or B-2 stealth bomber.
Secret technology could be giving house-size spheres the power to zoom around in incredible maneuvers or allowing mother ships a mile long and a half mile wide to hover over central and west Texas.
After all, the military has experimental technologies the public might not know about until decades after development.
"For national security reasons, of course, they're disinclined to tell us about it," said Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine. In addition to Shermer, an author of more than 20 books on secret and stealth technology, other think-tank experts and a former "Skunk Works" chief are among those weighing in. Some of the possibilities:
The government is conducting a campaign of disinformation, spreading UFO stories to cover up the truth, which could involve something like the F-117. Eyewitnesses surprised by fast-moving spheres and gigantic space ships saw jets from the 301st Fighter Wing at the nearby Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base. The UFO sighting in the news was at 6:15 p.m. Jan. 8 around Stephenville, Texas, in Erath County, was on the same day military officials say the 301st had F-16s on a training mission in the area.
But residents in Brown, Erath and Comanche counties have spoken of UFO incidents going back 30 years, said Ken Cherry, owner of a small financial services company who volunteers as Texas state director for the nonprofit Mutual UFO Network.
During the last two months, a cluster of UFOs cropped up in the area about a 77-mile drive from Fort Worth, Cherry said. Commercial and ex-military pilots, oilfield workers, ranchers, farmers and others reported sightings to the organization devoted to seriously researching UFOs. "Out of the small number of cases that we have been unable to solve, we've determined that UFOs do exist," he said. "The two leading theories are that these UFOs are either our secret technology or they're extraterrestrial technology."
Defense analysts are frank about the certainty the military is working on something secret but aren't ready to believe central Texas is where.
John Pike, a defense and intelligence expert, said the government has thrown up smokescreens before, like with Area 51 in Nevada, to discredit witnesses.
"If they get people seeing lights all the time, and they don't know what it is, one way of making the whole thing seem silly is to have people recall flying saucers," Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said. "And that way the whole story just kind of goes away."
Area 51 has played a role in modern American mythology about everything from secret military technologies to alien spacecraft. Beliefs vary as to the truth about the southern Nevada location although it's widely thought the military has black - classified - programs there.
The U-2, for instance, was tested at a secret base in Nevada, said Bill Sweetman, who's written extensively on stealth and black technology. In the 1950s, the Air Force exploited the UFO scenario to divert attention from the U-2, said Sweetman, editor of Defense Technology International magazine.
"Airline pilots who didn't know that a secret airplane was out there would see this object way up above them, and they would report it as a UFO," he said. Those sightings led to "Project Blue Book," Sweetman said. The Air Force research project on UFOs was actually designed to throw people off the track, making them think they'd seen a natural phenomenon or something unexplainable - not a secret airplane, he said. Sweetman didn't want to hazard a guess about whether Texans have spotted secret aircraft in development, but he was doubtful. "Why would you fly it near a populated area at all?" he said.
Sweetman also didn't think the sightings had anything to do with the debut of the first F-35B Lightning II in Fort Worth. Lockheed Martin touts the fighter as the first one to combine stealth, short takf/vertical landing capability and supersonic speed.
And it's impossible to speculate whether the UFOs in central Texas were signs of a secret program, said retired Air Force Col. Tom Ehrhardt, a former Pentagon chief of the "Skunk Works" or the Strategy, Concepts and Doctrine Division.
In an about face, the military said 10 F-16s based at the Fort Worth reserve base were on a training mission from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Jan. 8 in airspace including that over Erath County. Maj. Karl Lewis, a fighter wing spokesman, said it was just a mistake when he first told reporters the base had no planes in the sky that day.
"I did my best to correct it as soon as possible," Lewis said.
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