by Mack Maloney
The man looked up and to his astonishment saw a gigantic UFO hovering not fifty feet above his head. The craft was saucer-shaped, had dozens of blinking lights circling its rim and was making no noise. Yet all around him the air itself seemed to be rumbling.
The man yelled a warning to his passengers; they saw the craft and began screaming hysterically. Though he rushed back to his truck, the man just couldn’t take his eyes off the thing.
Suddenly the UFO shot straight up, to maybe a mile or so. But then just as quickly it came back down and resumed hovering over the pickup truck.
Finally it moved away, heading north on a course parallel to the highway. Over the strenuous objections of his passengers, the man started his truck and began pursuing the UFO.
After driving about five miles, he caught up to the strange craft. But suddenly the UFO was back over the pickup truck. Though his female passengers begged him not to, the man climbed out of the truck again and studied the UFO for a second time.
At this point the UFO turned off all its lights and moved away again. The pickup’s passengers heard another low vibration, which they were certain was emanating from the craft.
Then, the darkened UFO drifted out over the desert and finally disappeared.
* * *
On September 3, 2000, three men driving through the San Luis Valley were startled to discover a strange red light following their car.
It wasn’t another car, motorcycle or truck. It was just a single disembodied red light—and it was right on their tail.
The driver hit the gas. The mysterious light sped up as well. A chase ensued, the driver trying to shake the strange light, only to have it keep pace. Even driving like a madman through a series of S-curves in the roadway didn’t work. The UFO stayed right with him… until it abruptly disappeared.
* * *
On October 24, 1998, a motorist driving through the San Luis Valley spotted two large glowing white objects in the sky moving at a high rate of speed. At first, the motorist thought they were meteors, but this was unlikely as the sun was still out. Three days later, another motorist driving along the same highway saw a bright light disappear into a cloud—and not come back out.
Five months earlier, witnesses on the same highway saw what they described as “Hollywood-type spotlights” pointing up into the sky from the tops of the mountains in the distance. These bright lights, described as both white and red, appeared to be blinking in sequence. A few days later, other motorists saw the same strange sight—large spotlights along the mountaintops, again blinking on and off in sequence.
How Weird Is My Valley?
Colorado’s San Luis Valley has been called the “New Area 51,” but that’s really not an accurate designation. Something not only very strange but also very unique is happening in this place, stranger even than the most fantastic stories to come out of Groom Lake and its environs.
Located south of Denver, the “SLV” is 75 miles wide and 130 miles long. Encompassing about 8,000 square miles, it sits almost a mile and a half above sea level and makes up a large part of southwestern Colorado. With the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the east and the San Juan Mountains on the west, this alpine valley is a beautiful part of the American West, postcard-perfect in many places.
Yet UFOs of all shapes and sizes have been seen flying around the SLV for many years. These include saucers both big and small as well as cigar-shapes; needle-shapes; rocket-shapes; pencil-shapes; sausage-shapes; fireballs; huge triangles; low-flying red lights; alternating green, red and white lights flying in spherical formations; light gray objects; metallic spheres; globes of light of all different colors; UFNs (unidentified flying noises); wingless airplanes; elongated cylinders and at least one moon-sized object with a visible tail.
And that’s just a partial list.
No surprise, the SLV has the highest incidence rate per capita of UFO sightings anywhere in the United States, according to the Computer UFO Network database.
What’s going on here? Christopher O’Brien is a paranormal investigator and author and an expert on the SLV. As of this writing, he’s authored five books, including the essential Secrets of the Mysterious Valley.
O’Brien lived in the sparsely populated valley for years and still maintains a network of sky watchers and associates there. In that time he compiled a database of strange activity inside the SLV that runs for hundreds of pages. Probably no one knows more about the unexplained in the SLV than O’Brien.
Yet even he’s baffled.
“You ask, ‘What’s going on in the valley?’” he said during an interview with this writer. “I don’t have an easy answer for that.”
What Could Be Stranger Than a UFO?
When it comes to oddities in the SLV, it just begins with UFOs.
Consider the “prairie dragons.”
Undulating forms that seem to swim in the air a foot or so off the ground, prairie dragons look like giant sea slugs, but most people only see them out of the corner of their eye. They don’t leave tracks and they don’t make any noise, but most interesting, animals always seem to recognize their presence.
Then, there are the “shadow people.” People in their homes will see shadows of figures on their walls, but no one, or no thing, is in the room causing them.
The region also has ghosts, especially at a place called the Silver Cliff Cemetery, located just east of the SLV in Silver Cliff, Colorado, population four thousand. Silver Cliff residents see strange lights over this graveyard all the time. In fact, the entire town shut off its lights one night just to see if the unexplained graveyard illumination was coming from some kind of odd reflection of someone’s front-porch light. The town went completely dark, yet the graveyard lights still appeared.
The SLV experiences some very strange weather, too. Not only can storms form and strike quickly but sometimes the fog is so thick and so low to the ground it resembles cumulous clouds.
“But it’s even stranger than that,” O’Brien reports. “At times the fog seems to be ‘encased.’ It will cover a pasture but stop right at the fence lines. Other times it will make weird shapes. I personally saw an enormous saucer-shaped cloud floating above the Great Sand Dunes. It was so perfect, I took a picture of it. But not a couple minutes later, the thing had completely vanished.”
These days, cattle mutilations practically make up a branch of UFO study on their own. But in the SLV, it’s not just cattle that are being victimized. O’Brien reports that horses, sheep, deer, elk, pigs and even coyotes have been found mysteriously killed and cut up, with certain parts missing, other parts still intact. Mutilated but not butchered.
“There was even a case of a javelina mutilation,” O’Brien said, referring to the hairy piglike animal. “It was found up in the branches of a tree, all cut up. The problem is, there aren’t supposed to be any javelinas in the valley. They’re found in Arizona and other places, but not in the SLV. There’s no reason one should be up there.”
Residents of the SLV also hear and experience something like the “Taos Hum,” a nauseatingly low drone or vibration.
“It resonates through your whole body,” O’Brien said. “You don’t really hear it; it’s more like you feel it.”
In addition to the more typical UFO shapes, people in the SLV have also seen what are best described as wingless airplanes. O’Brien has seen one himself. “They are huge and look more like the space shuttle,” he said. “But they look like a space shuttle with no wings.”
And lately, there have been reports of flying humanoids in the valley. A cross between Dracula and Mothman, these strange aerial creatures have been seen by many reasonable and reliable people, O’Brien says, including policemen and municipal workers.
And if that wasn’t enough, there have also been many sightings of Bigfoot in the mountains and foothills surrounding the SLV.
How “Hot” Is Hot?
So, is the SLV the hottest of hot spots when it comes to UFOs and assorted paranormal happenings?
Unusual geophysical properties—At points on the globe where huge tectonic plates come together, the Earth’s magnetic field might have a very strong force on one side and a weak one on the other, leaving a seam or a rift. A lot of UFO sightings tend to be made along these rifts. The SLV is close to the Rio Grande Rift Valley, one of the largest rifts in the world.
A culture of Native American sacredness—The SLV is the only area in North America that has been shared by three different regional groups of Indians. More than a dozen distinct tribes have come to the valley over the centuries for things like vision quests. Most important, though, is that Blanca Peak, the Sacred Mountain of the East to the Navajo and Apache, is located here. This is a place where, some tribes say, “all thought originates.” And near the SLV’s Great Sand Dunes is the location of the Sipapulima (or “place of emergence”), according to Tewa and other upper Rio Grande Indian lore.
Multiple waves of unusual events—Not just flying objects, but also aberrant behavior, animal mutilation, strange weather and so on are frequently reported in hot spots. Strangeness in the SLV comes and goes; the 1990s in particular were an intense period of activity and thus provide some of the best stories. Also interesting is that O’Brien reports that when a wave is just starting up in the SLV, it seems to serve as a precursor to strange events elsewhere—like hundreds of miles away in the Black Hills of the Dakotas. Is this the paranormal equivalent of what Einstein called “spooky attraction at a distance”?
Close government proximity—The SLV is only about eighty miles from Colorado Springs, a place crammed with classified military installations. Plus, the La Veta military operations area, a gigantic swath of land just outside the valley to the east, run by the U.S. Air Force, is set aside for low-level military flight training.
Attempted military expansion into the area—The fifth element of a hot spot is true in the case of the SLV—the U.S. Air Force is constantly trying to buy up or take over more land inside or near the valley.
Secret Bases and Black Ops Nearby
“A lot of what people see in the SLV are probably black operations being done by the military,” O’Brien said.
Again, Colorado is home to a number of classified military bases. Many of them are close to Colorado Springs, which is only a few minutes’ flying time from the SLV.
At least three of these nearby bases are involved in highly secret operations. Schriever Air Force Base operates more than 170 of America’s spy satellites and is also the main control point for the Global Positioning System, what we know as GPS. Peterson Air Force Base is the home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (popularly known as NORAD) and the Air Force Space Command, whose 21st Space Wing provides missile warning and space control to U.S. combat forces worldwide. Buckley Air Force Base is involved in controlling America’s spy satellites as well, but the base also hosts the Colorado Air National Guard’s 120th Fighter Squadron and its F-16C fighters, among other air units. The Colorado National Guard also operates CH-47 Chinook, UH-1 Huey and UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters out of Buckley.
Just outside Colorado Springs is Cheyenne Mountain, the home of the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, NORAD’s former location. Known by its code name “Crystal Palace” during the Cold War, the Cheyenne station now serves as a backup to NORAD.
In case NORAD has to go back underground, it would return to Cheyenne Mountain.
* * *
It’s widely suspected that the U.S. military tests secret aircraft inside the SLV, just as it does at Groom Lake and other places two states over in Nevada. And maybe that explains things like wingless airplanes.
But what about the instances where people in the valley have seen military jets buzzing around UFOs?
“I’ve had law enforcement witnesses report they’ve seen a huge black triangle-shaped object being ‘escorted’ by F-15 fighters,” O’Brien said. “And I’ve had a report of witnesses seeing a small black triangle being chased by F-16s.”
O’Brien himself has seen such things. One night he got a call that two UFOs were heading in his direction. He went outside his house just in time to see a pair of large orange balls moving at high speed, heading south down the center of the SLV at treetop level. Exactly eight minutes later, two F-16s roared over as well.
“The jets were obviously pursuing these objects,” he said. “The long trail of flames coming from their afterburners told me both planes were at full military power.”
Strangely Routine
Strange events occur in the SLV so often, the residents almost think of strangeness as the routine.
In fact, unusual things have been happening in the SLV for a long time. O’Brien cites an entry found in the diary of the first Spanish governor of the New Mexico Territory in 1777. The governor mentions that his soldiers have witnessed lights and heard an unidentified humming in and around the SLV’s Blanca Peak.
“So many unusual things happen there,” O’Brien said, “that people don’t think it’s any big deal. No matter what it is, they’re used to it. That’s why I suspect that a lot of events are never reported.”
Still, some stand out.
What follows are some of O’Brien’s most baffling SLV incidents.
The Case of Snippy the Horse
On the morning of September 8, 1967, a rancher in the San Luis Valley went out to water his horses. He owned three but on this day only two were waiting for him. There was no sign of the third, a female Appaloosa named Snippy.
As the horses had a lot of open space on which to roam, the rancher waited a full day for the third horse to show up. But once twenty-four hours had passed, he set out to look for her.
After about an hour of searching he spotted the horse in a meadow not far from his main house. It was a gruesome discovery. From the tip of its nose down to its shoulders, the horse was nothing but bones. All of the skin, muscle and tissue from the neck and skull were missing and the exposed bones were bleached white, as if they’d been out in the sun for years.
Though horrified, the rancher made note of the immediate surroundings. He determined from tracks he’d found that his three horses had been running at full speed whenever the incident had happened. He surmised that the dead horse must have been cut off from the other two that eventually returned to his ranch house.
But the strangest thing of all was his discovery that the dead horse’s tracks continued for several hundred yards before they inexplicably stopped—while still in full gallop.
The rancher later discovered a number of burn marks on the ground near the horse’s remains. Also found were what several people described as gigantic horse tracks measuring eighteen inches wide and eight inches deep.
Though various investigators and media members looked into the strange incident, just what happened was never determined. One thing was certain: The horse wasn’t killed and then partially eaten by scavengers. The condition of the carcass showed no evidence of this.
The case still baffles people of the SLV today.
The Mysterious Yellow Helicopter
On June 5, 1980, a seven-hundred-pound prize bull had been put in a small pasture by its owner. This pasture was about a quarter mile from the owner’s ranch house.
Just around dusk on that same day, the owner’s family was sitting down to dinner when they heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. The sound grew until the copter went over their house, flying very low. While the family was used to seeing utility-company helicopters flying around, the nearest set of power lines was located more than three miles away. That’s why the family thought it unusual that a helicopter should be flying so low right over their domicile.
A few minutes passed, and then the family heard the helicopter again. But this time it sounded like it was taking off from the vicinity of the bull’s pasture. The family went outside and saw the aircraft for the f
irst time. They described it as an old-fashioned, two-man, whirlybird-type helicopter, mustard-yellow in color. And indeed it was taking off from the pasture where their bull was located.
The helicopter flew right over the ranch house again, no more than forty feet above their heads, before disappearing to the north.
The next morning the family went down to the pasture and found their bull was dead. Its sex organs and eyes were gone, its rectum had been cored out and a plug was missing from its flanks. Inexplicably, a horde of flies that had been eating one part of the carcass were also dead and scattered around the body.
Angry that their bull had been killed, the family called every aviation facility in southern Colorado, hoping to locate the home base of the old-fashioned helicopter. Trouble was, no one had seen anything like the whirlybird-type aircraft the family described. What’s more, the family was told that particular model, which was from the Korean War era, not only was extremely rare but would have been extremely expensive to fly because of its age. Plus, due to its high fuel consumption and decades-old avionics, such a helicopter would have very limited range, something along the lines of ninety miles round-trip, if that.
So, whose copter was it and what did its occupants do to the prize bull? The family never found out.
But this weird story gets even weirder. O’Brien first investigated this particular incident thirteen years after it happened. His investigation included doing an extensive interview with the bull’s owners. The morning after this interview, as he was sitting in his kitchen typing up his notes, O’Brien heard the faint sound of a helicopter approaching. Looking out his window, he was shocked to see an old-fashioned, mustard-yellow whirlybird-type helicopter heading his way. It went by his house at fewer than two hundred feet in altitude, allowing him to see it clearly.
Other members of his family, plus some neighbors, also saw the strange helicopter as it flew past and as it disappeared over the horizon.
The same ultra-rare helicopter, thirteen years later?