The Temple Highway Craft

In the published record the craft bore a painted marking that read something like TLA 138, and the man who climbed into it looked like an ordinary airman. At about five past five in the morning on 23 March 1966 William Eddie Laxson was driving US Highway 70 about eight miles south of Temple when he found it parked across the road. In the archive's telling the man tending it wore military fatigues with rank chevrons. As Laxson approached, the man went aboard. The craft lifted off with a high-pitched drilling noise, and Laxson felt the hair on his arms stand up as if in a static field. The published record puts its departure speed at about seven hundred miles an hour.

What is on the record

Laxson was a civilian instructor at Sheppard Air Force Base, and the archive's source describes him as a pilot and engineer. He is the archive's only claimant, from a single video. The published record adds a second witness, the truck driver C. W. Anderson, whom the archive does not yet count.

The descriptions of the craft differ. The archive's telling calls it shaped like a bowling pin. The published record gives a wingless fish-shaped body about seventy-five feet long with a plexiglass bubble.

The document is what sets this case apart. The archive holds the Project Blue Book file for 23 March 1966 at Temple, a government primary record. Blue Book did not resolve the craft as a known aircraft. Some commentators have suggested a classified prototype. That remains a suggestion and the file does not confirm it.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L4. It is document-corroborated, because a government record carries it, and its evidence class is official record. The tier measures that paperwork rather than the number of witnesses. One man's report sits in the Air Force's own files, and the record holds a second witness the archive has yet to count. What stood on Highway 70 that morning is not resolved here.