Is there intelligent life beyond our planet? It’s a question a lot of people have been asking in the wake of a highly publicized UFO sighting earlier this month in Stephenville, Texas.

It doesn’t get much more down to earth than the Houston suburb of Spring. 

Sure, you can walk on the moon for a price, but you’d never expect to meet the man you’re about to meet.

“They call me the alien hunter,” Derrel Sims said. “The reason is because I hunt them that hunted me.”

From the time he was 3 to the age of 17, Sims said he was abducted by aliens on numerous occasions the last time culminating with a surgical implant.

“It was extremely painful,” he said. “It broke the bones in my nasal passage when it was jammed in.”

But he said it wasn’t until the same thing started happening to his own son years later that he became the alien hunter.

“You come after my children, and I’ll come after you with a vengeance,’ he said. Since then, he has crisscrossed the globe investigating so called abductions.

“One of my abductees took a picture of the craft she thought took her,” Sims said. 

And collected evidence.

“We think it housed a biological camera that was lodged in a woman’s retina,” Sims said. “These are the little gold spheres taken out of an abductee’s nose.”

Sometimes, he said, with the help of Houston doctors.

“I work with some people at M.D. Anderson and MHMR and other places,” he said. “They will never come forward. … Because they don’t want to lose their careers.”

Such is the fearful climate, he said, fostered by government conspiracy.

“Stephenville is a good example where they say, ‘oh yeah, our airplanes were up there flying, and they were refueling,’” he said. “Hey, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.”

Stephenville, Texas and Erath County got worldwide attention earlier this month after multiple sightings of a UFO.

The Air Force later claimed it was F-16s flying in the area.

“The odds are pretty fair that’s not the case,” aerospace industry consultant Jay Miller said. “I can’t imagine 10 F-16s were in the air from same air base at the same time.”

There’s also the matter of the people who reported the sightings: decent, salt of the earth people like Constable Leroy Gaitlin, mesmerized by the object’s flashing lights.

“They were dancing around and they were flickering, but they weren’t just doing this,” he said. “They were like, just moving.”

Or Steve Allen, a Stephenville businessman and private pilot.

“I’d say it was about a half-mile wide and about a mile long,” he said. “It was humongous, whatever it was.”

“Since mother ships never come this close to earth and show themselves to us at all, the fact that it wasn’t invisible or cloaked means I think they want us to get used to the idea that yes they are here,” Houston UFO Club President Gail Brittain said.

“They” may want us to get used to the idea, she said, but not the government.

“Of course. They won’t let their men talk,” she said.

She and other believers point to purportedly top secret videos from NASA missions posted on the Internet.

“I’ve been a working scientist in this agency for 38 years,” Dr. Everett Gibson said. “I have never seen scientific evidence withheld from the public.”

Dr. Gibson started working for NASA on the day Apollo 11 splashed down. An astro biologist, he was a lead investigator of samples collected from the moon and more recently co-led a team that concluded there was once life on Mars after analyzing a meteorite from the red planet. The conclusion that turned the scientific world on its ear and continues to be debated.

“It’s a detective story,” he said. “I’m basically CSI — the ultimate.”

Dr. Gibson’s thoughts on the Stephenville sightings?

“Those are good folks who live in Erath County,” he said. “They had something that happened there, and they’re reporting it. I think we have to keep an open mind.”

Although he said it’s unlikely extra-terrestrials were involved. For now, Brittain will simply have to agree to disagree. Her beliefs, thank you kindly, still very much in tact.