By Marla Crockett, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Marla Crockett, 90.1 Assistant News Director and reporter: It started out a pretty typical Sunday. After returning home from lunch, I walked out to the front yard to retrieve our New York Times. I bent over to pick up the paper, and immediately to my right saw a black ring. It was a few feet from our driveway, about 5 inches in diameter, an inch high, and around the top of it there were six silver patches where it looked as though something had been sheared away.
My first thought was shuttle debris. I'd been at KERA on Saturday afternoon working on our coverage about the disaster, and the story locally was all about where pieces of the spacecraft had landed. Part of me wasn't convinced one had literally fallen in my front yard, more than 100 miles from the primary debris field, but I quickly called the state hotline. About an hour later, a state trooper arrived at our house in southwest Plano to check things out.
Wearing latex gloves and using a metal bar, Trooper McAllister spent several minutes inspecting the ring. It was metal, he said, and didn't look like it had come from around here, so he contacted his supervisor and surrounded it with three orange cones. Things were getting, well, exciting, and I had a sudden urge to tell someone, so I called our neighbors Jean and Jim across the street - and Bill Zeeble, who brought me a tape recorder. It wasn't long before other neighbors and onlookers began dropping by.
Marla Crockett to anonymous passerby: "Where do you live? You were driving by? Well, this thing just kind of landed in my yard. This is your yard? This is my house. Wow, I thought you were just driving by and saw it. No "
Crockett: A woman from around the corner walked up to report several pieces of metal bar in her street. Trooper McAllister went down to investigate, and on my way over to take a look, I walked past my neighbor Art Granier, who had just found a piece of metal in a flower bed near his sidewalk.
Art Granier, Plano resident: Actually, the girl next door just noticed it and pointed it out to us. It appears to be about 6 inches long. But I don't know, it's really weird.
Crockett: Okay, there's the metal ring in our yard, the metal bar in Art's yard, four pieces of metal here on the road, and a neighbor just mentioned there might be a piece of tile in the street somewhere, so I'm gonna walk down now and take a look
The tile story didn't pan out; it turns out the two suspected tiles were actually broken, ceramic warning signs. A neighbor approached me in the street to make the correction.
Marla Crockett speaking with anonymous resident: "Can you tell me about the tiles?" "They're not tiles." "What do you think they are?" "They're glued on, it's for a storm drain, but my husband and I thought it said Air Force."
Sherry Brado, a woman at the end of our block, also had a false alarm after discovering a piece of metal bracket in her backyard. She quickly concluded it was left by workmen, but all told, neighbors discovered about a dozen pieces of broken black metal on or near the street next to ours. William Diggs, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, said of the eight potential debris sites troopers had inspected in North Dallas and Plano over the weekend, this one had the most potential.
William Diggs, Department of Public Safety spokesman: This is the only area we're staying in. It's probably a little more suspicious, it's a possibility we're not going to rule it out, but we're not going to say it is yet.
Crockett: So, a state trooper car will be guarding our house and adjoining street until federal agents can determine if the debris is for real. I don't know how long that'll take. Maybe 2 to 4 days, maybe longer. I haven't had a lot of time to reflect on this experience; a lot happened in a short afternoon, but I met neighbors I didn't know I had; we connected during a few hours of discovery and amazement that our small neighborhood had become part of a national investigation. But by the end of the day, after all the excitement had worn off, I just felt drained, sad, and eerie. For KERA 90.1, I'm Marla Crockett.
To contact Marla Crockett, please send emails to mcrockett@kera.org.