Richard G. Santos Speaks-UNIDENTIFIED LIGHTS OVER WINTER GARDEN AREA OF SOUTH TEXAS

By

Richard G. Santos

Last week’s issue of the Sentinel had not yet been released and I had not discussed my up-coming column with anyone when Mari took me by surprise. I will not give you her last name as I would not like for her to drop a pot of hot coffee on my lap. I am sure you would agree that would be hard to take over breakfast at my favorite early morning café. At any rate, no sooner had I walked into the restaurant that Mari started telling me about some lights she, her family and friends had been seeing in the sky.
As Mari said, she and about six other people of various ages had for three days been seeing bright orange lights in the sky. The lights are described as “bright orange and moving from right to left and back at a high rate of speed”. Moreover, the round, bright lights at times form triangles and then break up into individual spots of light.
The early bird edition of the paper appeared Wednesday and I immediately received email from a Zapata Street resident reporting “bright orange lights in the sky moving fast from side to side.” The writer reported she had video tape of the lights and has promised to make the tape available for me to see
That same Wednesday night Mari sent a messenger asking me to hurry to her parents’ home on Lake Street for the lights were in full sight! Taking Robert Hernandez along as a witness, we arrived at the house about 9:20PM. There were three adults and three minors in the backyard intensely looking in a southerly direction. According to all present, they had been seeing the lights since about 7:30 as they moved from south-southwest to east-southeast.
Always looking for a scientific explanation, I and Robert both noticed there was a slight mist in the air but not enough to cause any refraction of vehicular lights beyond the horizon. There were also no airplanes or helicopters in the air and apparently the Carrizo Springs Airport beacon was either not on nor visible as there were no clouds to cause a refraction. Yet all present were adamant in stating the bright orange lights could be seen moving from south-southwest, hovering in the southern sky, then move very fast to the east-southeast. Neither Robert nor I saw any lights and left the scene slightly after 10PM.
The following day I received email from the Zapata Street resident reporting she and her family had seen the lights the night before. Her account of the lights was almost identical to what Mari and her friends and relatives had reported seeing the same night before. Yet, the two families do not know each other and until now have not been told about each other’s light-seeing reports!

The paper was delivered on Thursday and by that night and Friday before noon three other people had already stopped me to report seeing “bright lights in the sky”. In this case it must be stressed these people were not referring to the same day or time. Robert Fiscal who lives on Avenue B near Canela’s Bakery said he and a friend saw a fast moving orange light shaped like a football flash across the sky in a southerly direction. Thinking a meteorite had fallen south of the city near Popeye Lake or Chula Vista, they drove to the area but found and saw nothing.
The same person says that once when cutting cedar near Dallas, he and his fellow workers were surprised by a beam of light. According to Mr. Fiscal, the men were sitting around a campfire late at night when a large circular light brightened the area where they were at. There was no helicopter in the sky with searchlights so they had no explanation for what they experienced.
A political candidate whose name I cannot mention says he also saw light in the sky in Utah while traveling toward Washington State. He stated he had run out of gas on a hill and while pouring gas into the tank, he spied a bright orange light in the valley below. The light was moving rapidly from left to right and ever so often rose in the sky and hovered for a while. Again it would go down and move from side to side until at one point it started moving toward him!
According to my friend, he jumped into his truck and told his female companion to “rollup the window and lock the door”. The light reportedly never grew in size larger than a softball or grapefruit. However, the light got brighter as it neared until “some ten feet away it broke up without making a sound”. “It looked like one of those fireworks you shoot in the sky that explode into many pieces,” he said referring to what are called “roman candles”. My friend admitted being really so frightened by the incident that his eyes were “as big as a half dollar” when he arrived at the next town’s service station. The man at the gas station asked what had happened and he told him about the light. The service man replied “everyone knew about the lights but no one knew what they were”. My friend said his encounter with the lights was really scary and he never forgot it. In this case I have two questions. First how close was he to Area 51 in Nevada where the government for years has been testing ultra secret aircraft. Second, why do people call him “grapefruit”?
While at the restaurant’s parking lot, another friend approached to ask if the disappearing fish story was true. Fortunately Eziquiel Romero was present so he repeated the story and his experience as it appeared in the paper. He was reminded the same had happened at a ranch off Cometa Road so there are at least two reported identical incidents without any explanation for either one. The man then told us about his experience “on the shortcut road east of Batesville connecting Highway 57 with FM 117.” According to our friend, he took the shortcut but stopped in the middle of the road when nature called. He left the car running and with the lights on. He had not finished reliving himself when the car lights went off. He angrily asked his wife why she had turned off the lights but she replied “she had not touched anything”. Realizing she was telling the truth, our friend says he jumped in the car and sped off to “get away from that spot as fast as he could.”

I had not yet left the parking lot when another friend told me another story. That is, that he and his daughter were on the county road leading to the pecan orchard off Highway 65 when his car began to sputter and jerk. Moreover, the battery indicator pin was “moving left and right and going crazy as the electrical energy seemed to be going on and off”. According to this
friend, his daughter noticed a murder had been committed near the area where this was occurring so he “stepped on the gas to get away as soon as possible.”
The same person told me that in the late 1940’s he saw a large, brightly lit triangle off FM 1025. He told his science teacher at the high school but the teacher laughed. Several days later the teacher reportedly told him he had also seen the triangle in the sky!
In conclusion, it seems as if bright, orange, red and flickering lights moving rapidly in the sky in the Winter Garden Area have been seen by people since the 1940’s for sure. It also seems no one discussed it openly until the column appeared in last week’s issue of the Sentinel. Hence once again we ask our readers to email me at richardgsantos@yahoo.com.

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Zavala County Sentinel – 24-25 Dec 2008….. Crystal City, Texas

3 Replies to “Richard G. Santos Speaks-UNIDENTIFIED LIGHTS OVER WINTER GARDEN AREA OF SOUTH TEXAS”

  1. 2008, i was on the balcony of my apartment when i noticed lights in the clouds at about 7.30pm moving sideways, these light moved for about 10 minutes. i had never seen anything like that before. No aeroplanes, no helicopter or any sign of a searchlight, i got a bit scared and excited at the same time as I thought to myself that it had to be a UFO. i did not want to be the only witness so i decided to get to a neighbour on the ground floor but by then the lights had disappeared.

    A colleague reported his experience last week Wednesday, 30th September, 2010. When he got to the office following day, he goes ”did you guys notice anything in the Sky about 10.30pm last night?”. and because we did not. He told us how he saw lights in the clouds and he knew they were not from an aeroplane, not lightning and no helicopters and his conclusion was that it had to be from a ufo. others laughed, that was when i narrated my experience too.

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