Close encounters of the Cameron kind; woman recalls night with UFO (Temple Daily Telegram, 03-08-2009)
From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project
The Article
by Jeanne Williams
CAMERON - People told stories about encounters with unexplained, slow-moving, glowing objects in the night sky over Stephenville last January. There were reports of an unidentified amber-lighted aircraft that buzzed President Bush’s Crawford ranch last summer. Those and the 34 aerial anomalies witnessed in Texas skies last month and reported to UFO-trackers at MUFON are merely déjà vu to Cameron’s Penny Mowdy Horelica.
In the early spring of 1975, Mrs. Horelica, then a C.H. Yoe High School senior, said she was returning home in her 1964 black Ford Mustang from an after-school job at the Safeway Supermarket when, five miles outside of Cameron on FM 1600, she spotted a glowing object in the sky that resembled a bright motorcycle light floating on the horizon.
As the object maneuvered directly toward her, floating around like no conventional aircraft moves, her first thoughts were that it was a weather balloon or “something Air Force,” she said.
Just before she approached the Little River Bridge, the object closed in and chased her down FM 1600 until it rendezvoused with her vehicle, hovering atop the Mustang and floating back and forth as the scared teenager floor-boarded her car toward home, she said.
As the craft got closer, it changed in appearance from an iridescent motorcycle light to a moon-sized, then a sun-sized sphere, and, close-up, matched the dimensions of Cameron fire station’s rear parking lot.
“I was so scared I couldn’t get away from it,” Mrs. Horelica said.
The car interior was illuminated by the craft that produced a low hum. The radio was jammed to static, and the car’s headlights went out.
Blinded by the light, she said she kept driving on instinct, with the object hovering overhead. She arrived at her grandmother’s house scared out of her wits.
She stopped the vehicle, jumped out and raced to the front porch, where she met her grandmother, pointing out frantically the huge, lighted object that by then floated over a field in front of the house. Her grandmother called neighbors who also witnessed the glowing craft. The aircraft hovered less than a minute before a fireball exploded and it vanished into darkness.
“We never saw anything like that again,” Mrs. Horelica said.
The adventure continued the next day at school where history and science classes were devoted to her UFO experience, which had been reported on a local radio station after she reported the sighting to the Cameron Police Department.
Mrs. Horelica consented to a live interview on the radio, and her experience was reported in two weekly newspapers.
Penny Mowdy became famous for a while as the Yoe High teenager who had seen a UFO.
“I got a lot of flack,” she said. “But it wasn’t that bad because I wasn’t the only one that had seen it. Kids and some people were like, ‘What were you drinking?’ and stuff like that.”
Teasing did get so intense by some skeptics at school that she cried. The drive home after her 10 p.m. shift ended was a frightening experience for a while, and she kept searching the dark sky for a lighted object. To date, she has never again seen a UFO, but fear lingers.
“I had trouble with it,” she said of the sighting.
The terror she experienced the night she was chased by a glowing and humming UFO doesn’t haunt on a day-to-day basis, but it surfaces when she drives at night in a lonely area or sees an aerial light of an airplane or helicopter, or a bright star.
As a teenager, she had no interest in science fiction, UFO sightings or the extraterrestrial, preferring dancing, parties, handicrafts, fashion, friends, movie stars, and listening to classic country singers such as Hank Williams, Johnny Horton and Marty Robbins.
After high school graduation, she got a job as Cameron police dispatcher, and married Henry Horelica, who today is the Cameron fire chief.
The Horelicas raised their family in the fire station. Today, this busy mother, grandmother and fire department ladies auxiliary volunteer checks UFO reports, watches programs on sightings, and there is déjà vu when newsreels show people describing “something similar to what I saw,” she said.
Mrs. Horelica said she is not sure how the UFO sighting was investigated by law enforcement. Records on the sighting could not be found at the Cameron Police Department. Officials said the reports probably were destroyed after sustaining severe water damaged from a leaky roof.
Milam County Sheriff David Greene said if a sighting is reported, investigators would take a statement and contact aeronautical authorities after first contacting Fort Hood.
MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, headquartered in Morrison, Colo., established in 1969 by Seguin resident Walt Andrus, recorded a UFO sighting in Texas in 1975, said Alejandro Rojas, MUFON’s director of public education and media relations. That was the year of Mrs. Horelica’s sighting.
While Mrs. Horelica saw a round lighted object, the witness of another sighting observed a cylindrical formation of red lights descending from the sky. Lights turned white then scattered and disappeared, Rojas said.
Additionally, in the mid-1970s during the summer, a woman and her cousin were traveling east on FM 2861 from Highway 16 north of Comanche when they saw “a huge formation of red lights in a cylindrical shape heading toward the ground. The lights were very wide in the middle of the shape but not on each end. As it got very close to the ground, the red lights turned bright white, scattered and disappeared,” Rojas said.
MUFON, one of three groups in the UFO Research Coalition, sees a rise in the number of reported UFO sightings in recent years. In January, MUFON recorded 549 reports, with 34 of those from Texas.
“However, it is hard to say whether that is due to the public knowing more about us and how to reach us, or whether there are more sightings,” Rojas said. “For instance, we received a lot of media coverage during the Stephenville, Texas, sightings last year, and our number of sightings nationwide increased, we believe due to people being aware that they can report their sightings to us. People can go to our site to report sightings, and to view the reports that have been made.”
UFOINFO, another tracking organization on the Web, reported a UFO sighting in Milam County on Jan. 6, 2005, identical to a “brilliant object caught on film” at Kaufman County. A Milam County resident who was not identified reported a good-sized rounded type of object with a silver sheen that was trailed by a long blue-white flame and trail of smoke. A year earlier, she and her husband saw three silver, round objects traveling the same path.
Mrs. Horelica describes her incident as “a very different experience, but it is one that I don’t care to have happen again. We will never know in our lifetimes what it was.”
There was no question in Cameron that Mrs. Horelica had seen a strange object, said her husband, Henry. Since then, others have related UFO sightings in Milam County.
“She was real scared,” said Horelica, who has seen “lights in the sky that are stationary, and then they go, too quick to be an airplane. The world is just a pinpoint in the universe. Who is to say there is not anything else out there?”
Credits
Special thanks to Temple Daily Telegram.
