WICHITA, Kan. - Brandon Mowry still doesn't know for sure what he saw flash across six or seven video frames about six years ago, but knows for sure it was an unidentified flying object.
Mowry, who attended school in Gering and graduated from Morrill High School in 1996, worked for the Star-Herald and Gering Courier while in high school and college, and he became part of a nationwide mystery because of video footage he shot while a photojournalist for an Albany, N.Y., television station.
The television photojournalist will be part of the History Channel's "MonsterQuest" feature on Wednesday at 8 p.m. local time about Unidentified Flying Creatures.
On Oct. 20, 2002, while working as a photojournalist for FOX 23 News in Albany, NY, Mowry, now almost 30, was at the Albany International Airport getting weather "bump shots" and photographing airplanes to use for the evening's weather segment.
After photographing five or six planes he headed back to the station and went into the edit bay.
"I really hadn't seen anything unusual," Mowry said during a recent interview. "I just happened to stop and pause (the video) and there was this thing that shot through. It was only six or seven frames, or about a quarter of a second, from the bottom right to the upper left."
Not knowing what he saw, Mowry said he immediately pulled in the assignment editor.
"Her mouth dropped," Mowry said.
Immediately the Albany police were called, but Mowry said he had to go out and cover a car wreck. When he returned the newsroom had been sectioned off and everybody was being questioned about the young photojournalist and his honesty.
Even the FBI got involved because of the ongoing security concerns in the nation. Mowry said he had to return to the airport and show investigators the location where he shot the video.
The original video was confiscated and sent to Washington for analysis.
"They found out it was legitimate," Mowry said. The station had the foresight to make copies of the original video shot by Mowry that has made the rounds since, portions of which can be found on YouTube and on Google by searching for Albany UFO.
Mowry said he continued to be interviewed by the FBI and even had to undergo an extensive lie detector test, which agents at first said he had failed but later said he had passed.
"That was one of the strangest and worst days of my life," he said. "I knew I really didn't do anything. I was just doing my job and it was on my tape."
Within a short time Mowry was interviewed live on Fox and Friends and The Early Show with Hannah Storm and then things kind of died down.
"I even was on the Art Bell radio show in the middle of the night," he said.
Things kind of died down and Mowry said he didn't hear much for about five years and he moved on to KSNW, the NBC affiliate in Wichita, Kan.
"I still don't know and the FBI still hasn't come up with an explanation of what it was," he said.
Mowry said he heard from a producer at the History Channel that it was doing a show about "rods" - biological creatures that supposedly live in the upper atmosphere, and possibly what he might have captured on the video clip.
According to the History Channel Web site: "For decades cameras have been capturing images of a flying, torpedo-like creature. So fast it cannot be seen with the naked eye. Some think it is a military weapon, others believe it may be a creature from another dimension. But just what is it? This MonsterQuest scientific journey will use super high-speed photography, physics and even a wind tunnel experiment to shed light on a creature simply referred to as Rods."
MonsterQuest seeks to reveal the truth of legendary monster sightings around the world. Deploying the latest in hi-tech equipment, each episode scientifically examines the best evidence available, from pictures and video, to hair and bones, as well as the eyewitness accounts themselves.
The History Channel flew Mowry to Albany to shoot reenactments from shooting the weather footage, the reaction of the assignment editor and even the interrogation by the FBI.
"I guess I never thought of it as being a living creature," Mowry said, "but this is a documentary about rods. I'm curious to see if my video is the same as the others."
Despite his newfound 15 minutes of fleeting fame, Mowry has his sights set on a just completed 22-minute documentary from raw footage on the Greensburg, Kan., tornado that devastated the small community. He hopes that piece and other work he is doing will propel him into a top 20 market, such as KUSA Channel 9 in Denver.
"I was in Greenburg just five hours after it hit," he said. "That was one of the reasons I was looking forward to coming to Kansas, was to chase tornados."