Reporter Fired For UFO Stories
I had an idea for a column entitled “Why I Don’t Care About the Stephenville UFOs,” but this item caught my attention. It’s more to do with people’s reactions to the situation, rather than the fact that Stephenville’s temporary weirdness will be forgotten in a few weeks or months, with nothing further to add to the UFO mystery except more mystery.
Angelia Joiner, the recently famous reporter for the Stephenville, Texas Empire Tribune was fired from the paper last week.The editor told her that it was time to move on and not to write any more UFO stories. This seems strange, as the Empire Tribune experienced their best sales in years, maybe ever, during the time when Joiner was reporting on the strange goings-on, including the MIB-type harassment of some locals. She was supposed to have had until the 14th to clear up her desk and say her goodbyes, but her computer was confiscated and she was told to leave a week early.
The editor, in a moment of candor, told Joiner that the order to stop printing UFO news had come from a local councilman, who said that the stories were an embarassment and were making the town look silly.
More on this at UFO Blog, including statements from Joiner about the sad and strange circumstances of her recent unemployment.
Grist for conspiracy junkies? Someone is going to have to write a book about this one.
Update: Some of the commenters have reminded me that apparently Joiner had decided to quit on her own a couple of weeks ago. Since she was asked to leave early in no uncertain terms, technically, she was “fired.”
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Feb 15 2008 
February 15th, 2008 at 3:07 am
It’s disappointing to see censorship in the name of officialdom is alive and well in 21st century even in small town Stephenville, Texas. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
I have a theory about the MIB. Anyone whose ever dealt with officialdom knows how jealously guarded information can be the MIB are trying to suppress the spread of information about ufo’s and their activity to conceal their particular agency’s ignorance about what ufo’s really are. The X-Files was actually a fairly accurate portrayal about what the FBI knows about other agencies knowledge of ufo’s. That being zip,zero and nada. They might have some peripheral knowledge of sighting and abduction cases but unless the ET’s were allies with extremists movements or foreign intelligence since ‘90, the FBI didn’t do much investigating of UFO’s. I doubt that there’s even much sharing of UFO reporting between the USAF and the US Navy. I can see the Cheshire cat grin of F-117 pilots as they snuck up on Navy planes during maneuvers especially during the early ’80’s. The Navy pilots would have reported it as a UFO for certain as it was like not picked up by radar or infrared sensing. From what’s been released about its performance, once you lost visual on it, you weren’t going to find it again.
I think that the Stephenville sighting and aftermath brought the wrong kind of people to the town. People that didn’t spend a lot of money who were getting underfoot and putting the town under the media microscope. Let’s call this the Twin Peaks effect. Small town folk like to keep secrets or think they can but strangers asking questions about character or personal history makes most folks nervous especially in a mind-your-own business place like Stephenville.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Or maybe it’s just that some folk like their town peaceful and BORING, you know? I know there are some residents of Roswell who resent the perennial link between their town and the UFO phenomenon (presumably the ones that aren’t cashing in on the tourism and sales of souvenirs).
But what I have read was that Joiner had decided to resign on her own, since she was exhausted of dealing with the hundreds of e-mails and requests that seh now was responding to at her free time, because the newspaper told her it was time to “move on” the silly UFO biz; but when she gave her two-week notice, their employers told her to leave that very same day (Friday, I think). The haste of the decission to leave it’s what weird.
I didn’t know they secured her computer though.
I wish good luck to Angelina Joiner in all her future endeavours. Maybe she could write a book about the Stephenville case, why not?
February 15th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Why does this whole thing feel scripted to me? Extravagant mass ufo sighting with military aircraft in tow. A few days in the national news cycle. Denial from the Air Force. Gawkers flock to small town. Absurd explanation from the Air Force. Witness harassed by MIB. Intrepid reporter fired.
I could see how this sort of thing would have been effective in the old days but with the Internet in play it now just seems silly. Are we being handed an easily recognizable, formulaic ufo play or are the people involved creating and selectively reporting it on the fly?
When is the last time a newspaper gave a damn about a city councilman’s opinion?
February 15th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
I read the story and it says she was quitting her job and gave a two week notice. The company let her go a week early — but I don’t see where it says they fired her. It sounds to me like she thought she knew more than all the other people combined in her organization, and when the ol’ veterans didn’t take her rookie advice to keep the story going on and on forever, her poor ego couldn’t allow her to go on, so she quit. Sounds like a case of a sore loser.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
not_anonymous,
The councilman’s comment may have been used as an excuse by the editor to push Joiner out the door.
Also, we can’t always know what goes on in politics and who owes who favors, etc.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
All,
See update above.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
As ufo-blog.com shows, the paper seemed happy enough to have published 7 ufo stories by her in the previous month. As editors usually decide what stories a reporter will work and what stories get published it would seem odd to suddenly decide that the solution to the claimed ufo fatigue on the part of the public would be to fire the reporter you assigned to work the stuff in the first place.
I guess it depends on what kind of place the paper is but it really doesn’t strike me as too suspicious to tell somebody just to stop work after they hand in two weeks notice. Two weeks notice is what an employee does as a courtesy to the employer and if the employer isn’t desperate for help then it is often better to just let the person go and save some money rather than have them just punch a clock and screw around. It also is pretty standard to go take a computer after termination to prevent a vengeful employee from sabotage or other network naughtiness. I’ve worked at some pretty mundane places where it was standard procedure to lock someone out or confiscate their terminal immediately upon termination precisely for those reasons.
Of course none of this means that there wasn’t real pressure applied to stop the paper from printing ufo coverage, I’m just saying ufology might be reading want they want to believe into this.
If the paper wanted her to work on something else it would seem to me that she would still be free to investigate on her own time and publish on http://www.stephenvillelights.com/ as she is doing now. It just sort of reads that while she is stating the facts about how she came to no longer work there she is trying to strongly imply that she was in fact fired because she was reporting on ufos. This implication would be more believable if she was actually unexpectedly terminated rather than being let go early after handing in notice on her own.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:26 am
“a local councilman, who said that the stories were an embarassment and were making the town look silly.”
It looks like the only other ufo story they published after her departure was one titled “Ethel, Don’t Look”. A headline in your paper that references a Ray Stevens song- now THAT is something to be embarrassed about!
February 16th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
OK so instead of that Friends chick coming “face to face” with Angelina Jolie the conspiracy is that the journalist Angelina Joiner was secretly channeling her repressed “Numen Est Omen” (Name is Fate) parallel universe with Brad Pitt’s wife aka Tombcroft.
The MN-based Center for Reichian CryptoAnthropology has already turned down several publishing and “tie-in” mass media blitz offers from McDonalds and Disney, instead opting for the kitsch cult-classic route.
Let’s hope this poltergeist-UFO-kitsch cult is finally under the raps, just like that talking otter.
February 25th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Interestingly, the good reporter is still reporting on UFOs’. Perhaps she “gets it.”
I mean this in the sense she feels her efforts may contribute, in small or large part, to the most significant discovery for the human race to date.
I would like to think this is the motivation driving her pen.
It seems reasonable to think a person of sound moral charater once convinced of the occurrence; not to mention a reporter whose very stock in trade is disclosure of facts, would or could settle for less than complete immersion and persuit of the truth in such an enigmatic incident.