Spielberg Netflix Doc Details UFO Sighting the Size of '17 Football Fields'

Netflix's new Steven Spielberg-produced documentary Encounters is revealing the alleged true stories of encounters with otherworldly phenomena. Arriving on the platform on Wednesday, Sept. 27 amid the current UFO craze, the four-part series at one point pulls back the curtain on a strange pattern that occurred in Texas: the "Stephenville UFO" case. For five months between October 2007 and March 2008, more than 300 locals near Stephenville, Texas reported seeing a large "delta shaped" UFO, which some said was a mile-long, while others reported it being the length of 17 football fields.

Described as a "V-shaped formation" with seven orange-red lights, the large object in the sky was reported on multiple occasions, including on January 8, 2008, when 19 witnesses alleged that they saw an unidentified flying object as it passed from Dublin, Texas, to Stephenville, all while being pursued by US military fighter pilots. The strange incident grabbed national attention, with ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, CBS News, National Public Radio, and more covering the story. Throughout the months-long ordeal, witnesses reported seeing the UFO hovering above campfires and flying past major highways, with pilot and businessman Steve Allen saying that on the Jan. 8 incident, the object, which he described as being "a large object one mile long and half a mile wide," was "moving away at high speed, soundless."

Encounters, a Netflix original documentary, features eyewitnesses to the Stephenville UFO case, as well as Robert Powell, the nanotechnology engineer whose investigation helped document the large UFO via Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radar data. Powell told the Daily Mail of the ordeal, "It was like a circus." Powell said they were "interviewing various witnesses – it was so loud that you couldn't even interview them properly. The key witness interviews occurred outside of that."

The Stephenville UFO case was first broken by local reporter Angelia Joiner, who broke the story for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune. Although Joiner's decision to report on the story ultimately cost her her job at the newspaper, Powell said Joiner "felt that she owed it to the citizenry to give them answers. They knew these weren't F-16s [fighter jets] because F-16s would fly over every day of the year, constant, nonstop. So, they knew what F-16s look like." Powell said eyewitnesses "would call her and say, 'Well, what have you found out? Has anyone else reported it?' Blah, blah, blah – and she felt obligated to answer their questions."

Although the Stephenville sightings still remain a mystery, Powell and Glen Schulze, a career electrical engineer, worked together to analyze radar, eventually determining that the object in the sky "moved at about 2100 mph." The pair were also able to identify moved at about 2100 mph." The Stephenville UFO case, as well as other encounters, is documented in Encounters, now streaming on Netflix.