BOWMAN — “It was coming through the treetops. I could hear the limbs cracking.” Moments before, Ed Williams heard and felt the force of jets overhead. When the back window shattered on his parked 2002 Chevrolet Tahoe, blowing glass straight out toward the road, “I figured a tree limb had fell.” However, when Bowman police and fire personnel arrived on the scene, they discovered something more — a small hole in his tin-roofed car port, the shattered Tahoe window, a broken house window and a strange silver object lying on the ground. The mystery surrounding the incident caused officials to cordon off the Dibble Street home while they tried to figure out exactly what the object was and if it was dangerous. It took the Air Force to identify the object as a piece from one of its jets.

“It was an object somewhere around eight inches long with a spring on it,” Orangeburg County Fire System Coordinator Gene Ball said. “It apparently went through the roof, hit a car, broke the windshield out, bounced out and hit a house.”

Bowman authorities were notified at about 7 p.m. of a possible vandalism at the residence, Police Chief Jason Marchant said.

“It went downhill from there fast,” he said, referring to the rumor mill surrounding the strange metallic object that touched down in the eastern Orangeburg County community.

The Bowman Fire Department and the State Law Enforcement Division were notified of a device that had crashed out of the sky and into the Williams’ car and car port.

On-scene authorities were unable to immediately say the object wasn’t explosive, Marchant said, leaving police no choice but to clear the area.

In the meantime, a call was put in to officials at both the North Auxiliary Air Field and Shaw Air Force Base.

“They were trying everything they knew with us on the phone trying to ID it,” Marchant said.

Having landed within two blocks of Bowman’s UFO Welcome Center, the inevitable jokes were passed around, the police chief said.

UFO Welcome Center operator Jody Pendarvis said he heard two jets fly over Monday night, followed by a second pair 30 minutes later. Since 1994, Pendarvis has kept his eyes on the sky, watching and waiting for a guest or two from a faraway galaxy.

“I doubt he (the jet’s pilot) knew he dropped anything — if that’s where it came from,” he said. “Things come out of space, drop, all the time.

“They just missed their target last night. I think they meant to drop it on my place.”

While no one was injured by the object, the danger was actually very real, Marchant said.

Meanwhile, Bowman suffered no shortage of theories as to what dropped from the skies, he said Tuesday.

“We’ve heard everything — the pilot ejected and was stuck in the roof of the house — that’s my favorite,” Marchant said. “We heard another story that the wing fell off and hit the house.”

Williams said everyone initially on the scene was thinking the same thing — what was that strange object from the sky?

“We didn’t touch it,” he said. “I said, ’It looks important, whatever it is.’”

Indeed, in the scheme of military life, that metal object is important. Military officials at an Air Force base near Goldsboro, N.C., issued a press release saying the object isn’t quite as unidentified as may have been thought.

“An F-15E Strike Eagle from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base accidentally dropped an object in a residential area in Bowman, S.C. last night around 7 p.m.,” the release states. “The object has been identified as a pylon ejector foot, a six-inch cylindrical piece of metal used to aid in the launch of missiles from the aircraft.”

At about 2 a.m., SLED was asked by military officials to lend a hand in dealing with the errant object, Chief Robert Stewart said.

“They asked us out of an abundance of caution to send a bomb unit to the Bowman area,” Stewart said. “It was not a bomb device or explosive ordnance.”

While the pylon ejector foot does not contain any explosives, the part is used to aid in the launch of missiles from the F-15E aircraft. The jet can fly without the part and the pilot did not realize it had fallen off until Tuesday.

The press release states that Air Force officials are still looking into what caused the object to rocket through the car port and car.

Just seconds before the crash, Williams said he was halfway to his dog pen when he heard the roar of jets overhead.

When he looked up, “I could see the afterburners on one of the jets,” Williams said. “They were glowing orange and blue. It was just a deafening roar.

“(Then) it (the Tahoe) just blew up with glass everywhere.”

His wife, Cindy, their children, Candi Craig and Buster Williams, and Craig’s children, Marisa Herndon and Dylan Craig, were in the home when the object crashed in their car port.

“My daughter had just walked by there (in the path of the falling object) and got inside the door when it happened. She had just come to pick up her children,” Cindy Williams said.

She was resting in her den at the time, while her children and grandchildren occupied the kitchen, when the sound of jets streamed through the air. Then the explosive sound of the impact filled their ears. Buster Williams flung himself over his niece and nephew, with Candi Craig covering them.

“My first thought was that one of my grandchildren had done it” — had broken something in the house, she said. “It was just amazement, something like that happening. You don#,t hear of something like this happening.

“God just watches out for us. You know, it (the falling object) had to have force coming through. It went through the tree limbs and then hit.”

Ed Williams would have normally been under the car port on a Monday night, next to the Tahoe, grilling out for his family. This Monday night, however, Cindy Williams cooked chili for supper.

“It would probably have hit me between the waist and the head” if he had been standing there, Ed Williams said. “It came through like someone throwing a rock — it happened real quick.

“It’s not too often you hear of things just falling out of the sky. It picked one house out of 450 in Bowman. It’s a good thing it didn’t hit during a parade.”

As for grilling out on Monday nights in the future, Ed Williams said, laughing, “I might just skip Mondays. I’ll eat out.”

Cindy Williams said the Bowman agencies, “did a fantastic job, the police and the fire departments.” Insurance adjusters from the U.S. Air Force were at the home Tuesday assessing the damage caused by the object.

Marchant said after “that Eagle dropped one,” he’s going to ask Air Force officials if they can have their birds fly over someone else’s town.

“I’m going to look into that and see what I can do,” he said. “Can’t hurt.”

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