A strange object in the sky Wednesday afternoon over a wood debris storage area on Old Mill Road caused a Lufkin man and his wife to call local authorities asking for answers.
“It didn’t look like no plane,” said Jerome Gardner, who lives across the street. “It was amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Gardner said he was skeptical at first when his wife, Yolanda, told him about the large, round object hovering over the field at the former site of the Louisiana-Pacific paper mill.
But after looking at the object in the sky, Gardner quickly found himself climbing onto his roof to get a closer look.
“I freaked out and just thought, ‘What in the world is that?'” he said.
Gardner described the flying object as a large white circle with a ball on the top and a white light shining onto the ground. At first, jets could be seen flying across the sky before the object appeared, but Gardner quickly realized what he was looking at was no jet.
“A jet leaves a white streak in the sky, and this wasn’t like that,” he said. “It was traveling real slow, like it was looking for something, then it turned around and took off across the sky very fast.”
When asked if the object could have been a UFO, or a flying saucer, Gardner said he wouldn’t count that out as a possibility.
“I don’t know what it was but if I had to guess, I’d say a spacecraft,” Gardner said. “It was strange enough for me to climb onto my roof for the first time to get a better look.”
Officials at the Angelina County Sheriff’s Office and the Lufkin Police Department said that neither office had received calls about the object Wednesday afternoon. A security guard working at the site said he had not seen anything strange in the sky.
Officials at the Angelina County Airport were not immediately available for comment at press time.
Gardner isn’t alone. There have been several sightings recently of unknown objects in the Texas sky. A fireball seen over the weekend across the state has been described by authorities as most likely a meteor, and not space debris from two colliding satellites, as previously suspected.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the fireball appeared to be a natural phenomenon, and a University of North Texas astronomer said that it was probably a pickup truck-sized meteor with the consistency of concrete, according to a recent article in the Houston Chronicle.
The object was visible Sunday morning from Austin to Dallas and into East Texas. In Central Texas, the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office received so many emergency calls that it sent a helicopter out to look for debris from a possible plane crash, according to the article.
Preston Starr, the observatory manager at the University of North Texas, said objects bombard the planet on a daily basis and those as large as the one spotted over the weekend enter the atmosphere about eight or 10 times a year, the article stated.
Whatever the cause of Wednesday’s sighting, Gardner said he would keep watching the field at the old paper mill, looking for another glimpse of something “out of this world.”
“I wish I’d grabbed my camera because I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said. “It was amazing, man.”
This is one of a few sightings that have been on going in this area. If we have any readers from around here with any video or pictures go ahead and contact us.
