The school netted $7,000 for college scholarships. "Money just fell out of the sky," Principal Travis Stillwell said.
Sensing a historic moment for the town, the Literary Lion bookstore invited customers to jot down their accounts for future generations. Owner Sarah Canady put out salsa and chips for the crowd.
The reports attracted the attention of the Mutual UFO Network, a group that investigates UFO sightings. People who had never talked about UFOs suddenly came forward with tales going back years.
Meeting at the Rotary Club in nearby Dublin, the group collected dozens of reports, including one from Kay Harris, a former factory worker who handed out photocopies of a map charting the route of a flying disc that passed over her home in 1995. She said she had pulled out a handgun but held her fire. "I was not about to start War of the Worlds," Harris said.
Gaitan watched the furor unfold. He had initially been hesitant to mention the event but now couldn't stop talking about it. Media calls came from all over the world, and by mid-February he had logged more than 100 interviews.
His instinct as a lawman was to stick to the facts, so he avoided leaping to conclusions about the lights. Still, he couldn't dismiss a nagging thought at the back of his mind. How could we be alone in a universe so big, he wondered.
"It would be like having a 20- to 30-acre lake and being the only creature in it," he said.
In the midst of the frenzy, his 15-year-old daughter, Katie, came home from school one day and flatly told him that UFOs weren't real. Her school friends didn't believe in them either, she said.
He found himself explaining that "UFO" didn't necessarily mean flying saucers and little green men. It just meant no one knew what the lights were.
Gaitan asked Katie if anyone at school was teasing her because he was on television talking about UFOs, and to his relief, she said no.
Joiner was swamped by calls about strange objects in the sky. Even though she was supposed to be covering the schools, she couldn't help pursuing the UFO story.
"As much as I would have liked to cut it off, I couldn't," she said. "I didn't want to abandon the witnesses."
A logical explanation for the lights was the military; a portion of Erath County falls under a fly zone used in training exercises. When Joiner checked, however, the 301st Fighter Wing stationed near Fort Worth said no aircraft had been near Stephenville when the lights were first observed Jan. 8.
