"They came within a mile of us," said Allen, the owner of L&S Enterprises and Texas Freight, a local trucking company. "It flipped us all out."
The lights headed toward Stephenville, where they came to a stop. They reconfigured to form an arch "shaped like the top of a football," Allen said, and realigned into two vertical lines of randomly flashing lights. Then the object burst into a dirty white flame.
"It looked like something firing up, like a blowtorch," Allen said. "It simply vanished."
Ten minutes later, the group saw the lights coming from the opposite direction. Trailing them closely, Allen was certain, were two military jets, followed by two massive red orbs.
Allen, who as a licensed pilot was comfortable judging distance, said the lights were 3,000 feet above the ground.
When the light show was over, he went home and told his wife, who urged him to keep the encounter to himself.
Allen spent a sleepless night, enthralled by what he had seen. In the morning, he contacted the Empire-Tribune.
His call went to education reporter Angelia Joiner. She knew nothing about UFOs, but Allen sounded like a sensible man.
"He was a pilot and seemed very intelligent," said Joiner, a 47-year-old former schoolteacher who had been a reporter for 18 months. Allen's friends confirmed the account, convincing Joiner the sighting was real.
Still, it was a strange story and Joiner's bosses were concerned. Managing Editor Sara Vanden Berge said she was so anxious that she cried the next morning when she saw "UFO" in the headline. Everyone is laughing at us, she thought.
That was before the television crews started showing up. First came the local reporters, then people from "Good Morning America," NPR and CNN.
"Do you believe alien beings are out there?" CNN's Larry King asked, looking into the camera. "Do you believe they've come to Earth?"
A Japanese film crew showed up and theorized that the UFO was related to the local dairy farms, Allen said. Aliens like milk, they told him.
The town was swept into a UFO maelstrom. People sported aluminum foil alien hats at Stephenville High School basketball games. Men with belt buckles big as fists were wearing "Alien Capital of the World" T-shirts rushed into production by a local company.
The high school science club decided to capitalize on the events by selling its own T-shirts that said: "Erath County -- the New Roswell," referring to the UFO mecca in New Mexico. The shirts carried a picture of a cow being beamed up to a spaceship with the caption: "They came for the milk."
