© Jack HarrisWitness image blown up and filtered.
Those photos were discussed on the radio show Friday, May 29, when I was a guest - unaware that another report of what may have been the same object had occurred earlier in the day.
A "missile or rocket" was spotted just 150 feet below a Continental Express jet flying at 13,000 feet at 8:15 p.m., Friday, May 29, as it passed over Liberty County, Texas, according to a Houston Chronicle report.
The pilot of Embraer 145 said the object did not show up on his radar, according to a spokesperson for ExpressJet Airlines, which owns Continental Express. Flight 2822 - with 23 passengers and three crew members - had taken off from Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport and was headed to Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, South Carolina, according to an Associated Press report.
May 2008 incident
The Houston Chronicle also reported that sheriff's chief deputy Ken DeFoor said a similar incident was reported by a Continental Airlines pilot in May 2008, in approximately the same area as this report.
November 2008 incident
Reached at his home in Texas today, Harris said his November 25 sighting occurred around 1 or 2 p.m., when he had gone into the back yard to put his dog on a chain. His eyes were drawn to the sky when he heard what he thought was a military jet coming toward him.
© Jack HarrisWitness image of object moving over his home.
"I started snapping the close-up pictures of it at this point," Harris said. "It was very, very loud. It sounded like a jet, but had a deeper rumble. As the vapor trail was being made, it was rolling on the inside of itself, as though there was a current inside of the trail, making the vapor suck back into itself. I snapped two or three photos at full zoom. My camera has a 12X zoom and is 5.1 mega pixels. Then I zoomed out and took pictures of the entire length of it. If I were to guess how high up it was, I would say 2,000 to 3,000 feet."
Then the object seemed to be controlled as it maneuvered in a different direction.
"As it got near the horizon, it took a sharp right angle turn, heading north. It completely changed direction once it was far out. Then just as I was going back into the house, I hear a military jet coming overhead. Those are a little harder to see. I never saw the jet, but I could hear it. This jet was heading in the same direction as the first object."
Later when Harris had blown up some of the images, the object making the chem trail was not there - invisible - although the blown up version of the chem trail (main photo, above) appears to be in a missile shape. We discussed the idea on the radio show that night that this chem trail may have been a missile. But shot from where? And heading where? Was this an object that was being tested by area military? Why is the missile itself not showing up on photos?
Another UFO sighting
Then on his Thursday, June 4, show, Harris took their studio camera outside so that his web listeners who were watching his streaming video could see an approaching storm. The show turned into a discussion on a small object next to the moon. Harris said it was an overcast night and stars were not visible. From inside the studio, Harris asked his producer, Selene Spencer, to move the camera around, wondering if the light they were seeing was actually a bad pixel on the camera. But as they were attempting this experiment, Harris' production assistant, Jimmy, noticed something much more unusual in the sky - and called to Harris to come outside.
"I walked outside," he said, "and there was a huge triangle in the sky. It had white lights on each corner and a pulsing red light on the back. It was slow moving, so we scrambled to take pictures."
He said the object appeared to be about the size of your thumb at arm's length.
"We did our best to get some kind of photos," he said. "The adrenelen was rushing. It was directly above us and moving from east to west - again the same direction as the other object. I came over the house, and when it was further away, that's when we heard a slight sound of humming."
UFO chase
But Harris wasn't ready to give up. He took one half of his car's T-top off, grabbed a higher memory card for his digital camera, and he and Selene gave chase. They headed west on a freeway to catch up to the object.
"We were coming up a hill, right by the cut-off that goes east toward the state park. And there's a radio tower over there. And Selene says, 'There it is.' It came right over the car. But the lights had changed. There were three larger lights in a straight line now and there was a cluster of lights in front.
"As it passed over, I got on the highway toward the state park. There was a woman in a car looking at it. She saw me with my camera sticking out the top of my car. The object got a little ahead of us, and then so far away, it became lights in a distance. It steadily increased speed and moved away from us. I turned around and headed back to the studio."
Why did the lights change?
Harris kept asking himself why the light formation changed?
"One of the police officers investigating the craft that was hovering over the courthouse in Stephenville says his radar gun locked on the object," Harris said. "The image was like a pie plate cut into a triangle - it was horizontal. Then it pivoted itself up to a vertical and moved off." So Harris' point is that if this type of triangular craft turns itself at different angles, what you see from the ground can be different.
White vans in the area
With so much seemingly UFO activity in the area, Harris has his guard up - and he's looking for other clues.
On June 5 while enroute to a local gas station, he began to notice the same white vans. Two were on the same highway he traveled, but heading the opposite direction. Another one was pulling into a residential area. Then he spotted another one as he approached the gas station - and it turned in and parked.
Reminiscent of those Area 51 Jeeps, Harris - camera in hand - decided to take a few snaps of the van that pulled into the gas station lot for future reference. Looking at the photos later on his computer - one thing stood out. The van did not have the standard Texas-required inspection and registration sticker in the lower right corner of the windshield.
Military in the sky
And this past Wednesday, June 10, Harris had been sky watching during his show, but stepped outside when the show was completed at 11 p.m. CST.
"There were 10 or 15 military aircraft in the sky," he said. "They were all taking the same path the object was taking - east to west, doing the same pattern. They were active from about 11 to 11:30. And then they were gone."
Harris has filed a freedom of information request to seek radar results from nearby radar stations for the June 4, 2009, triangle sighting. Those results, he said, should be back in about four weeks.
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