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from believers in alien bodies at Roswell and other government con-
spiracies. The reflex reaction to the colorful flood of cosmic debris is to
dismiss all alien sightings.
Yet, after admitting, in the preceding chapters, that we cannot logi-
cally rule out such far-out possibilities as the zoo hypothesis and
directed panspermia, and staying mindful of Clarke’s Third Law,
shouldn’t we take another look at the UFO phenomenon? Taking a
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reflexive, dismissive stance toward all reports of sightings could be as
foolish as uncritical acceptance.
A big part of the problem is ufology (You follow, G?) itself. This
“discipline” of UFO study has blossomed to feed the endless hunger,
nourished on a bottomless dung heap of dubious reports. Anyone with
a little imagination and a bone to pick with the government, main-
stream science, or with any other authority can hang out a shingle and
be a bona fide ufologist (You follow gist?)
Such a clamor of voices and beliefs about UFOs and aliens scream
over the pop-culture airwaves that genuine signs of an alien encounter
might easily be lost in the noise. Ufology would be an excellent cover
for alien activities.
Within ufology, subfields abound. Old-school, no-nonsense ufolo-
gists think it’s best to focus on proving the existence of lights and space-
craft seen in the sky. They don’t approve of groups who push the reli-
gious dimensions of the experience or the alleged association with other
occult-sounding phenomena such as cattle mutilations, abductions, and
crop circles. They worry that these flaky, fringe ideas hurt the chances
of UFOs and ufology being taken seriously by mainstream scientists.
Despite the preponderance of obvious misinterpretations, hoaxes,
and false alarms, many strange reports have never been adequately
explained. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government, motivated by
a fear that the Soviets might have aerospace technology we didn’t know
about or might try to take advantage of public hysteria caused by UFO
reports, commissioned several studies. Many well-known astronomers
participated in these efforts, which all concluded that most UFO
reports can be explained away as natural or psychological phenomena.
But every serious study has always found a smaller number of truly
puzzling incidents and sightings.
Take, for example, the case of the “Foo Fighters.” These strange
balls of light, commonly seen pursuing warplanes, were observed by
airmen on both sides in World War II as well as in the Korean War.
Each side suspected that the Foo Fighters were some unknown techno-
logical innovation of the enemy’s. The Scientific Advisory Panel on
Unidentified Flying Objects, a secret U.S. government panel convened
in 1953, concluded, “Their exact cause or nature was never defined.”*
*Among the distinguished panelists was Luis Alvarez, who in 1981 was codiscoverer of the giant comet impact on Earth that doomed the dinosaurs.
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Strange lights that appear to follow aircraft are not necessarily alien
spaceships. I am inclined to think that a more mundane explanation
exists, but I cannot prove this, nor could panels of serious scientists
who tried their best.
The Scientific Advisory Panel was one of three official U.S. govern-
ment UFO studies in the fifties and sixties. The longest lasting was the
Air Force’s Project Blue Book, started in 1952. In 1966, the House
Armed Services Committee decided that Blue Book hadn’t gotten any-
where, so they handed the files over to the University of Colorado under
the direction of physicist Edward Condon. The “Condon Report,” pub-
lished in 1969, did not satisfy anyone on either “side” of the UFO con-
troversy. It concluded that nothing could be concluded and that further
study was not justified. Even many UFO skeptics criticized the report as
too eager to dismiss some well-documented reports as uninteresting.
I N M Y O W N B A C K Y A R D
Eager to do some informal research into ufology, I did end up road-
tripping for this book, but I didn’t have to drive as far as Roswell. Like
Dorothy realizing that her heart’s desire was not to be found in some
Oz, I found what I was looking for in my own backyard: an alien
Mecca in south central Colorado.
Roswell, as an alien destination, is more than a little overexposed—a
place where you go to observe the reaction to something that happened
long ago. Unfortunately, looking for a real alien culture there today is
like going to the corner of Haight and Ashbury to gawk at hippies.
Just like the hippies fleeing the Haight, all the real aliens must have
split the Roswell scene as soon as the press picked up on it. Where did
the hippies go? Many of them moved to small, forgotten towns in
Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado where housing was cheap and the
establishment had not bothered to reestablish much after the mines
shut down. The funny thing is, the aliens followed them.
Why is it that New Age meccas are often also places where alien
activity is heightened? How are we to interpret this alien attraction to
old Western mining towns that became happy hippie artist colonies in
the seventies and New Age hangouts in the eighties and nineties? Some
would say that New Agers and aliens alike are attracted to those
places where Earth power vortices draw in spiritually sensitive beings
regardless of their planet of origin. Or is it that the people who gather
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in such places are more open to the idea of alien visitation and more
prone to accept reports of extraordinary experiences? One commonal-
ity in various New Age beliefs seems to be a sense of belonging to a
chosen population that will, through its own personal breakthroughs
in consciousness, collectively help the entire human race to save itself.
A willingness to believe in the significance of your own cosmic role
helps propagate beliefs and stories in which the aliens are speaking to
you.
Whatever the reason, it turns out that one of my favorite spots on the
planet, Colorado’s San Luis Valley, has become a hotbed of UFO activ-
ity and lore. I first caught wind of this when, in the mid-nineties, a
band I played in—a world-beat funk contraption we called Mom’s
Instant Hot*—had a series of weekend gigs in Salida, a small central
Colorado town of old Victorian houses and art galleries. We’d play two
nights at the Victoria Bar on Main Street for a thousand bucks and
some seriously skanky little rooms to stay in above the bar. On the day
between the gigs, we’d hang out at the nearby Mount Princeton Hot
Springs. There, I first began to hear talk about UFO sightings in the
area. Everyone seemed to accept that several widely seen and unex-
plained apparitions had occurred around Salida, and many more in the
giant San Luis Valley to the south. It was not unusual to hear locals dis-
cussing theories of alien visit
ation, especially after some new sightings
in the summer of ’95.
On the morning of August 27, 1995, a number of people witnessed a
mysterious daytime UFO, a bright, shimmering object hovering over
Salida. Tim Edwards, a longtime local who ran his family’s restaurant,
the Patio Pancake Place, captured it on six and a half minutes of home
video. The whole town, and much of Colorado, was buzzing about this
sighting. Edwards was interviewed and profiled on numerous UFO-
related TV shows. This experience changed Tim’s life. He believes that
the occupants of the craft allowed him to videotape it for a reason, and
he is now on a mission to let the world know that these creatures are
real, and they are here. He transformed the Pancake Place into ET’s
Landing, an alien-themed restaurant, and he now devotes all his spare
time to the cause of ufology.
I’ve watched Edwards’s video, and he definitely captured something
* Westword magazine “Best of Denver” award “Best World-Beat Band” in 1995.
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strange—not any obvious natural or human-made phenomenon. It’s a
white, rhythmically pulsing, cigar-shaped thingy hovering way up in the
clear blue sky. I don’t believe it’s a hoax. You can hear the genuine
amazement and concern in the voices of Edwards and his friends and
family, as they excitedly point out the UFO to others and wonder what
it is. Tim’s seven-year-old daughter, Brandy, who first spotted the UFO,
asks repeatedly, “Daddy, can spaceships really grow bigger like that?”
Some “expert” on one of the UFO TV shows concluded that if it was at
eighty thousand feet, then it could be a quarter mile long.*
It might be trivial—a kite or a balloon, an atmospheric or auroral
phenomenon or an optical illusion—but as far as I know, it has not
been satisfactorily identified, so it is a bona fide UFO. I’m more pre-
pared to believe that it was some unusual, rare glowing cloud with a
bizarre physical explanation that we haven’t thought of.†
*And if his grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bus.
†“Prepared to believe?” Maybe that’s my whole problem.
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D O W N I N T H E V A L L E Y
Just south of Salida, over a mountain pass, lies the San Luis Valley, the
location of many UFO sightings and other strange reports. The word
unreal comes to mind every time I enter the valley. Located eight thou-
sand feet above sea level, it is bounded on the east by the steep fourteen-
thousand-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and on the west
by the San Juans, which slope gently up to the Continental Divide. The
valley is a hundred miles long (north to south) and seventy miles across
at its widest point.
The economy is still largely ranch- and farm-based. Looking into the
valley from its rims, you can detect human settlements, but only as tiny
dots on a huge landscape that has kept most of its original good looks.
Here, you remember how dark the sky can be at night on Earth. If any-
one up there is trying to get our attention, or even sloppily trying to
avoid it, this would be the place to see them. If the aliens desire a high-
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altitude, remote, flat, huge, and relatively empty landing site, they
couldn’t do much better than the San Luis Valley. And you know how
they are always drawn to sacred Indian sites, hippie towns, and hot
springs.
One third of the way down the valley on the east side lies the peren-
nially sleepy but spiritually restless town of Crestone. Cradled in the
forest beneath the dramatic peaks of the Sangres, and blessed by several
rushing mountain streams, Crestone is a power spot (as are Taos, New
Mexico, and Sedona, Arizona) that attracts aliens, hippies, and New
Age entrepreneurs. These days, you can get about a hundred types of
massage and a good latte at most power spots—perfect after a long
drive through the desert or a journey of many light-years in a cramped
saucer.
In the valley, Crestone is UFO central. Alien encounters there are a
kind of “rural urban legend” that has been carried mostly by Anglos
moving into an isolated valley that already had its share of tales—
a new cultural layer imprinting on and mixing with older Christian,
Hispanic, and Native American stories more deeply rooted in the land.
Throw in a long-standing Western distrust of the federal government.
Sprinkle with hippie counterculture, psychedelic drugs, and stir well
in a vast, enchanting landscape where perspective plays tricks on the
mind.
Crestone has long been considered a sacred place. The Ute Indians
knew this, as did the Spanish settlers who came into the valley and
threw them off the land. Crestone soon became sacred to those who
worship silver and gold, when both were discovered in the surrounding
hills, leading to several mining booms in the late 1800s. By the middle
of the twentieth century, the mines were all shut down and the town
was largely abandoned.
A group of developers tried to turn Crestone into a military retire-
ment community in the 1970s, but the retirees didn’t know or didn’t
care that it was a sacred power vortex. They all moved to Phoenix
instead. That was good news for the New Agers and assorted spiritual
seekers who have been trickling into the place ever since, buying the
relatively cheap land and building yurts, earthships, geodesic domes,
meditation centers, healing retreats, and at least one elaborate astro-
nomical observatory.
Crestone is so spiritually awakened that it is damn near insomniac.
There are temples, and serious practitioners, of many faiths, including
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several Buddhist centers, a Carmelite Catholic monastery, an ashram, a
stupa, and many other houses of Eastern and Western worship. Local
bulletin boards are plastered with advertisements for things like the
Gaia Matrix Oracle, and the Karmic Light Ashram and Yogurt Stand.
The local paper is full of classified ads for shamanic journeys, pastlife
regressions, ancient alien visitors, and serpent wisdom. It is common
knowledge, at least among some, that alien craft frequent the valley
and take a special interest in the high peaks above Crestone. Indeed, on
many mornings giant saucer-shaped clouds can be seen hovering over
the Sangres.
Though I snicker at some of this, I am also drawn there by the laid-
back hippie friendliness, the spiritual awareness, and the generous spirit
of tolerance and respect for others. Also, an aspect of the local culture
is quite progressive in exploring alternative energy and sustainable liv-
ing. Many locals are knowledgeable about new technologies that are
enabling these choices.
Knowing that the valley is a focus of UFO sightings and lore, I
; thought it would be fun to do some informal research during my writ-
ing retreat there in August 2001. Much of my data-gathering occurred
at several nearby hot springs—great places to leach out stress and soak
up local culture. I soon learned that, even among longtime residents
with good eyesight, opinions vary widely on what goes on in the sky.
The woman who runs the hot springs told me that if you just go outside
for ten minutes and look up, you’re sure to see alien activity, because
they are always up to something. Others who had worked out of doors
in the valley their whole lives told me that they’d never seen anything
unusual. It is as if two or more intermingled populations are somehow
living in the same place under completely different skies.
One place I had to visit was the UFO Watchtower and Campground
outside Hooper, in the middle of the valley on the way to Great Sand
Dunes National Park.* The UFO Watchtower was created by Judy
Messoline, who came to the valley in the mid-1990s to be a cattle
rancher. Ranching didn’t work out, but in the burgeoning local UFO
culture she found another calling and created the Watchtower—a big
metal platform raised about fifteen feet off the ground, standing next to
a dome-shaped, alien-themed gift shop.
*Where Carl Sagan tested the Viking cameras on turtles and snakes back in the 1970s, practicing for Mars.
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People come in a slow but steady stream to camp out, watch for
aliens, swap stories about sightings, and stock up on alien books, key
chains, T-shirts, videos, figurines, Frisbees, and blasters. Messoline is
warm and welcoming and has all the time in the world to chat. She is
eager for visitors to sight aliens from her tower and enthusiastically
repeats the stories of those who have. She told me about one girl who
had established communication by flashlight with a bright light pulsing
over the mountains. If you bring your own tale of alien contact, you
can get a free UFO Watchtower Frisbee or bumper sticker by letting
Judy tape-record your story and add it to her collection. She hopes to
publish a book of these stories.
While I was in the valley, I watched the sky as much as I could,
which, along with the hot springs research task, was not too much of a
chore. Certainly, a lot was going on up there. I saw two spinning galax-