Distant Star's Explosion Shatters Record
By SETH BORENSTEIN,AP
Posted: 2008-03-22 21:55:54
Filed Under: Science News
WASHINGTON (March 21) - The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye.
Photo Gallery
Stefan Immler, Swift / NASA Out-of-This-World
Space Photos1 of 28 The light from an exploding star 7.5 billion light years away set a record Wednesday for the most distant object ever seen with the naked eye. It's also the brightest gamma-ray burst afterglow ever seen, captured here on an X-ray telescope, left, and an optical-ultraviolet telescope, right.
The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.
The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour. Telescopic measurements show that the burst - which occurred when the universe was about half its current age, before Earth was formed - was bright enough to be seen without a telescope.
"Someone would have had to run out and look at it with a naked eye, but didn't," said Gehrels, chief of NASA's astroparticles physics lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The starburst would have appeared as bright as some of the stars in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation, said Penn State University astronomer David Burrows. How it looked wasn't remarkable, but the distance traveled was.
The 7.5 billion light years away far eclipses the previous naked eye record of 2.5 million light years. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles.
"This is roughly halfway to the edge of the universe," Burrows said.
Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun. The explosion vaporized any planet nearby, Gehrels said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2008-03-21 18:48:58
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Evolution of the Internet
From Times Online
Click here to find out more!
March 12, 2008
Google could be superseded, says web inventor
The next generation of web technology is likely to be far more powerful than the current crop, Tim Berners-Lee said
Ethernet cables going into a broadband router
Jonathan Richards
Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said.
The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in comparison to what could be achieved on the "web of the future", which he said would allow any piece of information — such as a photo or a bank statement — to be linked to any other.
Mr Berners-Lee said that in the same way, the "current craze" for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace would eventually be superseded by networks that connected all types of things — not just people — thanks to a ground-breaking technology known as the "semantic web".
The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web's development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data — not just a web page — so that it can "communicate" with other information.
Related Links
* E-mail inventor: I didn't foresee spam
* Web 3.0 and beyond: the internet's next 20 years
* Technology giants spark innovation free-for-all
Whereas the existing web is a collection of pages with links between them that Google and other search engines help the user to navigate, the "semantic web" will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information — a written street address and a map, for instance — which in turn will give rise to new services.
"Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.
"If you still weren't sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you wouldd know not to claim it as a tax deduction.
"It's about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life."
One example frequently given is of typing a street address which, if it had "semantic data" built into it, would link directly to a map showing its location, dispensing with the need to go to a site like Google `maps, type in the address, get the link and paste it into a document or e-mail.
The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be recognised and established — a bit like the process known as "tagging". One expected application is in the pharmaceutical industry, where previously unconnected pieces of research into a drug or disease, say, could be brought together and assimilated.
Mr Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while a fellow at CERN, the European Organsation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, would not be drawn on the type of application that the "Google of the future" would develop, but said it would likely be a type of "mega-mash-up", where information is taken from one place and made useful in another context using the web.
Existing "mash-ups", such as progams that plotted the location of every Starbucks in a city using Google maps, were a start, he said in an interview with Times Online, but they were limited because a separate application had to be built each time a new service was imagined.
"In the semantic web, it's like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitute on a map, and anyone can 'mash' them together and use them for different things."
Mr Berners-Lee, who is now a director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a collaborative project between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, sought to put into context the rapid growth of social networking sites in recent years, saying that once the semantic web was rolled out they would be thought of as one of many types of network available.
"At the moment, people are very excited about all these connections being made between people — for obvious reasons, because people are important — but I think after a while people will realise that there are many other things you can connect to via the web."
He also spoke about what he described as one of the key challenges of the web today — confronting the security risks associated with large databases of information that were attractive to criminals and identity fraudsters.
"There are definitely better ways of managing that threat. I think we're soon going to see a new tipping point where different types of crimes become possible and lucrative, and it's something we constantly have to be aware of.
"One option is to build systems which more effectively track what information you've used to perform a particular task, and make sure people aren't using their authority to do things that they shouldn't be doing."
Click here to find out more!
March 12, 2008
Google could be superseded, says web inventor
The next generation of web technology is likely to be far more powerful than the current crop, Tim Berners-Lee said
Ethernet cables going into a broadband router
Jonathan Richards
Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said.
The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in comparison to what could be achieved on the "web of the future", which he said would allow any piece of information — such as a photo or a bank statement — to be linked to any other.
Mr Berners-Lee said that in the same way, the "current craze" for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace would eventually be superseded by networks that connected all types of things — not just people — thanks to a ground-breaking technology known as the "semantic web".
The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web's development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data — not just a web page — so that it can "communicate" with other information.
Related Links
* E-mail inventor: I didn't foresee spam
* Web 3.0 and beyond: the internet's next 20 years
* Technology giants spark innovation free-for-all
Whereas the existing web is a collection of pages with links between them that Google and other search engines help the user to navigate, the "semantic web" will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information — a written street address and a map, for instance — which in turn will give rise to new services.
"Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.
"If you still weren't sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you wouldd know not to claim it as a tax deduction.
"It's about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life."
One example frequently given is of typing a street address which, if it had "semantic data" built into it, would link directly to a map showing its location, dispensing with the need to go to a site like Google `maps, type in the address, get the link and paste it into a document or e-mail.
The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be recognised and established — a bit like the process known as "tagging". One expected application is in the pharmaceutical industry, where previously unconnected pieces of research into a drug or disease, say, could be brought together and assimilated.
Mr Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while a fellow at CERN, the European Organsation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, would not be drawn on the type of application that the "Google of the future" would develop, but said it would likely be a type of "mega-mash-up", where information is taken from one place and made useful in another context using the web.
Existing "mash-ups", such as progams that plotted the location of every Starbucks in a city using Google maps, were a start, he said in an interview with Times Online, but they were limited because a separate application had to be built each time a new service was imagined.
"In the semantic web, it's like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitute on a map, and anyone can 'mash' them together and use them for different things."
Mr Berners-Lee, who is now a director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a collaborative project between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, sought to put into context the rapid growth of social networking sites in recent years, saying that once the semantic web was rolled out they would be thought of as one of many types of network available.
"At the moment, people are very excited about all these connections being made between people — for obvious reasons, because people are important — but I think after a while people will realise that there are many other things you can connect to via the web."
He also spoke about what he described as one of the key challenges of the web today — confronting the security risks associated with large databases of information that were attractive to criminals and identity fraudsters.
"There are definitely better ways of managing that threat. I think we're soon going to see a new tipping point where different types of crimes become possible and lucrative, and it's something we constantly have to be aware of.
"One option is to build systems which more effectively track what information you've used to perform a particular task, and make sure people aren't using their authority to do things that they shouldn't be doing."
Friday, February 15, 2008
Solar System Like Ours
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers and amateur stargazers have used an unusual technique to find a solar system that closely resembles our own and say it may be a new and more productive way to scour the universe for planets -- and life.
They said technique, called microlensing, shows promise for finding many more stars, perhaps with Earthlike planets orbiting them.
"We found a solar system that looks like a scaled-down analog of our solar system," Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University, who led the study, told reporters.
The new solar system, described in Friday's issue of the journal Science, has two planets of similar size and orbit to Jupiter and Saturn. It is the first time microlensing has been used to find two planets orbiting a single star.
The star is smaller, dimmer and fainter than our sun and the two planets are less massive than Jupiter and Saturn, but orbit at distances similar to the distances that Jupiter and Saturn orbit our own sun. "So it looks like a scale model of our solar system," Gaudi said.
The planets were detected orbiting a star, called OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, 5,000 light-years away from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.
The team of astronomers from 11 countries used a technique called microlensing to spot the planets.
"Microlensing works by using the gravity of the star and the planet to bend and focus light rays from a star behind it," Gaudi said. "If you are looking at one star and another passes in the foreground (gravity from the front star) will focus and bend light rays. That causes the background star to be magnified," he added.
LITTLE BUMPS
Any planets orbiting the star cause "a little bump" in this magnification effect, Gaudi said. In this case, the light from the more distant star was magnified 500 times.
Most of the other 250 or so extrasolar planets that have been seen have been detected using radio velocity -- tiny shifts in radiation, including light, that are caused by the Doppler effect. Most planets detected this way are super-large, super gassy and orbit very close to their suns.
"Microlensing is more sensitive to these cold, distant planets than the radiovelocity method," Gaudi said.
The discovery suggests these planets are common, the researchers said.
"Is there an Earth there in this system? For all we know there could be rocky planets in there but we couldn't find them," Gaudi said. "This could be a true solar system analog."
The 80-odd members of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment worked frantically night after night during the 11-day period from late March through early April 2006 when the two stars were close enough to one another, as viewed from Earth, to cause the microlensing effect.
"We tried to get 24/7 coverage of the event," said Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. "It gets to be dawn in one place and we have to get somebody observing in another place."
They included professionals but also two amateurs -- one using a public telescope in Auckland, New Zealand, and Jenny McCormick, whose backyard telescope is listed as Farm Cove Observatory in Auckland, New Zealand, in the report.
"I work from home in our home-built observatory," McCormick told reporters. "It is quite useful. It is very easy to get on collecting data, cooking dinner and ironing clothes."
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers and amateur stargazers have used an unusual technique to find a solar system that closely resembles our own and say it may be a new and more productive way to scour the universe for planets -- and life.
They said technique, called microlensing, shows promise for finding many more stars, perhaps with Earthlike planets orbiting them.
"We found a solar system that looks like a scaled-down analog of our solar system," Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University, who led the study, told reporters.
The new solar system, described in Friday's issue of the journal Science, has two planets of similar size and orbit to Jupiter and Saturn. It is the first time microlensing has been used to find two planets orbiting a single star.
The star is smaller, dimmer and fainter than our sun and the two planets are less massive than Jupiter and Saturn, but orbit at distances similar to the distances that Jupiter and Saturn orbit our own sun. "So it looks like a scale model of our solar system," Gaudi said.
The planets were detected orbiting a star, called OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, 5,000 light-years away from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.
The team of astronomers from 11 countries used a technique called microlensing to spot the planets.
"Microlensing works by using the gravity of the star and the planet to bend and focus light rays from a star behind it," Gaudi said. "If you are looking at one star and another passes in the foreground (gravity from the front star) will focus and bend light rays. That causes the background star to be magnified," he added.
LITTLE BUMPS
Any planets orbiting the star cause "a little bump" in this magnification effect, Gaudi said. In this case, the light from the more distant star was magnified 500 times.
Most of the other 250 or so extrasolar planets that have been seen have been detected using radio velocity -- tiny shifts in radiation, including light, that are caused by the Doppler effect. Most planets detected this way are super-large, super gassy and orbit very close to their suns.
"Microlensing is more sensitive to these cold, distant planets than the radiovelocity method," Gaudi said.
The discovery suggests these planets are common, the researchers said.
"Is there an Earth there in this system? For all we know there could be rocky planets in there but we couldn't find them," Gaudi said. "This could be a true solar system analog."
The 80-odd members of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment worked frantically night after night during the 11-day period from late March through early April 2006 when the two stars were close enough to one another, as viewed from Earth, to cause the microlensing effect.
"We tried to get 24/7 coverage of the event," said Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. "It gets to be dawn in one place and we have to get somebody observing in another place."
They included professionals but also two amateurs -- one using a public telescope in Auckland, New Zealand, and Jenny McCormick, whose backyard telescope is listed as Farm Cove Observatory in Auckland, New Zealand, in the report.
"I work from home in our home-built observatory," McCormick told reporters. "It is quite useful. It is very easy to get on collecting data, cooking dinner and ironing clothes."
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Scientists Create Artificial Life
US scientists close to creating artificial life: study
Jan 24 02:44 PM US/Eastern
Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years
AP Top Science News At 3:06 p.m. EST
US scientists have taken a major step toward creating the first ever artificial life form by synthetically reproducing the DNA of a bacteria, according to a study published Thursday.
The move, which comes after five years of research, is seen as the penultimate stage in the endeavour to create an artificial life form based entirely on a man-made DNA genome -- something which has tantalised scientists and sci-fi writers for years.
"Through dedicated teamwork we have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed," said Hamilton Smith, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, in the study published in Science.
The research has been carried out at the laboratories of the controversial celebrity US scientist Craig Venter, who has hailed artificial life forms as a potential remedy to illness and global warming.
However, the prospect of engineering artificial life forms is highly controversial and is likely to arouse heated debate over the ethics and potential ramifications of such an advance.
It is one of the Holy Grails of science, but also one that stirs deep fears as forseen in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World" in which natural human reproduction is eschewed in favor of babies grown artificially in laboratories.
Venter said in a statement: "This extraordinary accomplishment is a technological marvel that was only made possible because of the unique and accomplished ... team."
His researchers had "dedicated the last several years to designing and perfecting new methods and techniques that we believe will become widely used to advance the field of synthetic genomics," he added.
Lead author Dan Gibson said the team had completed the second step in a three-step process to create a synthetic organism.
In the final stage of their research which they are already working on, the Maryland-based team will attempt to create a bacteria based purely on the synthetic genome sequence of the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria.
The bacteria, which causes certain sexually transmitted diseases, has one of the least complex DNA structures of any life form, composed of just 580 genes.
In contrast, the human genome has some 30,000.
Jan 24 02:44 PM US/Eastern
Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years
AP Top Science News At 3:06 p.m. EST
US scientists have taken a major step toward creating the first ever artificial life form by synthetically reproducing the DNA of a bacteria, according to a study published Thursday.
The move, which comes after five years of research, is seen as the penultimate stage in the endeavour to create an artificial life form based entirely on a man-made DNA genome -- something which has tantalised scientists and sci-fi writers for years.
"Through dedicated teamwork we have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed," said Hamilton Smith, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, in the study published in Science.
The research has been carried out at the laboratories of the controversial celebrity US scientist Craig Venter, who has hailed artificial life forms as a potential remedy to illness and global warming.
However, the prospect of engineering artificial life forms is highly controversial and is likely to arouse heated debate over the ethics and potential ramifications of such an advance.
It is one of the Holy Grails of science, but also one that stirs deep fears as forseen in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World" in which natural human reproduction is eschewed in favor of babies grown artificially in laboratories.
Venter said in a statement: "This extraordinary accomplishment is a technological marvel that was only made possible because of the unique and accomplished ... team."
His researchers had "dedicated the last several years to designing and perfecting new methods and techniques that we believe will become widely used to advance the field of synthetic genomics," he added.
Lead author Dan Gibson said the team had completed the second step in a three-step process to create a synthetic organism.
In the final stage of their research which they are already working on, the Maryland-based team will attempt to create a bacteria based purely on the synthetic genome sequence of the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria.
The bacteria, which causes certain sexually transmitted diseases, has one of the least complex DNA structures of any life form, composed of just 580 genes.
In contrast, the human genome has some 30,000.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Scientist Makes Embryo Clones of Himself.
Ethical storm as scientist becomes first man to clone HIMSELF
By FIONA MACRAE - More by this author » Last updated at 17:46pm on 18th January 2008
Breakthrough: Dr Samuel Wood has successfully cloned himself
A scientist has achieved a world first... by cloning himself.
In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman's egg.
The embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.
Although they survived for only five days and were smaller than a pinhead, they are seen as a milestone in the quest for treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
But critics fear the technology could be exploited by mavericks to clone babies and accused the scientists of reducing the miracle of human life to a factory of spare parts.
Researchers from the Californian stem cell research company Stemagen employed the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, to create the embryos.
They took eggs donated by young women having IVF and replaced genetic material with DNA from the skin cells of two men.
The eggs were then zapped with an electric current to induce fertilisation and the creation of embryos.
Some of the skin cells came from Dr Wood, Stemagen's chief executive officer and a leading fertility specialist, while the others came from another member of staff.
The result was a handful of embryos, at least three of them clones of Dr Wood and the other man.
Although all were destroyed in the process, the technique is seen as a vital step in the creation of cloned embryos rich in stem cells, which are "master cells" capable of becoming any type of body tissue.
By FIONA MACRAE - More by this author » Last updated at 17:46pm on 18th January 2008
Breakthrough: Dr Samuel Wood has successfully cloned himself
A scientist has achieved a world first... by cloning himself.
In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman's egg.
The embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.
Although they survived for only five days and were smaller than a pinhead, they are seen as a milestone in the quest for treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
But critics fear the technology could be exploited by mavericks to clone babies and accused the scientists of reducing the miracle of human life to a factory of spare parts.
Researchers from the Californian stem cell research company Stemagen employed the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, to create the embryos.
They took eggs donated by young women having IVF and replaced genetic material with DNA from the skin cells of two men.
The eggs were then zapped with an electric current to induce fertilisation and the creation of embryos.
Some of the skin cells came from Dr Wood, Stemagen's chief executive officer and a leading fertility specialist, while the others came from another member of staff.
The result was a handful of embryos, at least three of them clones of Dr Wood and the other man.
Although all were destroyed in the process, the technique is seen as a vital step in the creation of cloned embryos rich in stem cells, which are "master cells" capable of becoming any type of body tissue.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Technological Evolution Vs. Biological Evolution
This is just a quick example of how technologically things are getting smarter and smarter as they get smaller and smaller, the opposite of our biological evolution from which all of our technological evolution has evolved.
Jobs Reveals Tiny New Laptop
Jan 15 02:29 PM US/Eastern
By MAY WONG and JORDAN ROBERTSON
AP Technology Writers
Ultra-Lightweight, .76 Inch-Thick Apple Notebook ‘MacBook Air’ Unveiled
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs took the wraps off a super-slim new laptop at Macworld Tuesday, unveiling a personal computer less than an inch thick that turns on the moment it's opened.
Jobs also confirmed the tech giant's foray into online movie rentals, revealing an alliance with all six major movie studios to offer films over high-speed Internet connections 30 days after they're released on DVD.
Always a showman, Jobs unwound the string on a standard-sized manila office envelope and slid out the ultra-thin MacBook Air notebook computer to coos and peals of laughter from fans at the conference.
At its beefiest, the new computer is .76 inches thick; at its thinnest, it's .16 inches, he said. It comes standard with an 80- gigabyte hard drive, with the option of a 64GB flash-based solid state drive as an upgrade.
Jobs Reveals Tiny New Laptop
Jan 15 02:29 PM US/Eastern
By MAY WONG and JORDAN ROBERTSON
AP Technology Writers
Ultra-Lightweight, .76 Inch-Thick Apple Notebook ‘MacBook Air’ Unveiled
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs took the wraps off a super-slim new laptop at Macworld Tuesday, unveiling a personal computer less than an inch thick that turns on the moment it's opened.
Jobs also confirmed the tech giant's foray into online movie rentals, revealing an alliance with all six major movie studios to offer films over high-speed Internet connections 30 days after they're released on DVD.
Always a showman, Jobs unwound the string on a standard-sized manila office envelope and slid out the ultra-thin MacBook Air notebook computer to coos and peals of laughter from fans at the conference.
At its beefiest, the new computer is .76 inches thick; at its thinnest, it's .16 inches, he said. It comes standard with an 80- gigabyte hard drive, with the option of a 64GB flash-based solid state drive as an upgrade.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Texas UFO
Dozens in Texas town report seeing UFO
By ANGELA K. BROWN, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 58 minutes ago
STEPHENVILLE, Texas - In this farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.
ADVERTISEMENT
Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.
"People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times," said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."
While federal officials insist there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several towns who reported seeing it over several weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object.
Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.
"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."
Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.
Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area the night of Jan. 8, when most people reported the sighting.
Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.
"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."
Officials at the region's two Air Force bases — Dyess in Abilene and Sheppard in Wichita Falls — also said none of their aircraft were in the area last week. The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.
One man has offered a reward for a photograph or videotape of the mysterious object.
About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mostly in California, Colorado and Texas, according to the Mutual UFO Network, which plans to go to the 17,000-resident town of Stephenville to investigate.
Fourteen percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press and Ipsos say they have seen a UFO.
Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan said that he first saw red glowing lights and then white flashing lights moving fast, but that even with binoculars could not see the object to which the lights were attached.
"I didn't see a flying saucer and I don't know what it was, but it wasn't an airplane, and I've never seen anything like it," Gaitan said. "I think it must be some kind of military craft — at least I hope it was."
By ANGELA K. BROWN, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 58 minutes ago
STEPHENVILLE, Texas - In this farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.
ADVERTISEMENT
Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.
"People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times," said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."
While federal officials insist there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several towns who reported seeing it over several weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object.
Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.
"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."
Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.
Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area the night of Jan. 8, when most people reported the sighting.
Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.
"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."
Officials at the region's two Air Force bases — Dyess in Abilene and Sheppard in Wichita Falls — also said none of their aircraft were in the area last week. The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.
One man has offered a reward for a photograph or videotape of the mysterious object.
About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mostly in California, Colorado and Texas, according to the Mutual UFO Network, which plans to go to the 17,000-resident town of Stephenville to investigate.
Fourteen percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press and Ipsos say they have seen a UFO.
Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan said that he first saw red glowing lights and then white flashing lights moving fast, but that even with binoculars could not see the object to which the lights were attached.
"I didn't see a flying saucer and I don't know what it was, but it wasn't an airplane, and I've never seen anything like it," Gaitan said. "I think it must be some kind of military craft — at least I hope it was."
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