ies, one from the inside and one from the outside. I saw eager clusters
of bright young stars just leaving their nebular nest and entering galac-
tic life, and tired, old red giant stars taking one last lap around the
galaxy, preparing to blow their guts back out into the stellar reincarna-
tion chamber. I saw enormous clouds of dark, obscuring dust drifting
down the Milky Way. I saw stars that we now know have planets cir-
cling them, and many more that surely must have planets. Closer to
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home, I saw Jupiter and Mars promenading through the starscape. I
also saw several good meteors, including one brilliant, slowly moving
fireball that lit up the valley and left behind a lingering glowing trail.
And I saw many satellites speeding along and winking out when they
fell into Earth’s shadow, and occasional high-flying aircraft, each flash-
ing its own distinctive rhythmic stripe across the sky, the silent songs of
mechanical birds. Low clouds drifting between the ranges revealed
themselves as migrating voids, black on near-black pockets of negative
space in an otherwise brilliant starscape.
It was all there, except no UFOs. Ordinarily I wouldn’t complain
about such a sky, but I was hoping for something else. I had been read-
ing The Mysterious Valley, a book by UFO investigator and Crestone
resident Christopher O’Brien, which chronicles UFO sightings, cattle
mutilations, and other reports of the “high strange” occurring in the
San Luis Valley. O’Brien had collected so many stories of glowing and
strangely moving lights and bizarre aerial phenomena that I thought I’d
have at least a reasonable chance of seeing something. I was determined
to watch attentively without preconceptions, expectations, or excessive
skepticism. I didn’t want to fail to see something extraordinary because
I was not prepared to see it. Conversely, I wondered if I could have
made myself see something if I was too well prepared.
I N V I T A T I O N O N L Y
After weeks of careful watching and listening, I started to question
whether I was observing the same sky as everyone else. One night at
the springs some people I met were matter-of-factly discussing UFO
sightings and even telepathic contacts with aliens. I told them that I
had been trying every night but had not yet seen any highly unusual
sky phenomena. I asked for advice. One woman who had experienced
many sightings told me that the most important thing is that you have
to invite them. They will not show up for just anyone, in just any state of mind. I asked if she could tell me anything more specific about how
you invite them. She said that you go to a very dark place and focus on
inviting them, on receiving them, on wishing them to be with you, and
you try to communicate to them that it is safe to come. After a while
spent meditating on these themes, sometimes they show up—lights in
the sky that hover, pause meaningfully, and seem to communicate with
you.
Have You Seen the Saucers?
347
Late the following day I was back on the porch of the Willow Spring
Bed and Breakfast, watching the last red rays of sun helping the Sangre
de Cristo Mountains live up to their name, when suddenly I saw a for-
mation of seven bright lights flash on simultaneously across a fifty-mile
stretch of the mountains. They lit up in unison, and trust me, they were
far too bright to be lights on cars, houses, or any conventional terres-
trial, nonclassified vehicles. They flickered for about ten minutes and
then faded suddenly. Could this be the work of some mysterious intelli-
gence? Possibly. But my mind, always demanding an explanation, got
the old hamster spinning and quickly found a plausible scenario. The
setting sun far behind my back was just a few degrees above the hori-
zon. When it hit just the right angle, it caused the windows on any
building within a certain altitude range in the mountains to bounce
direct reflections right at my spot on the valley floor, causing my retina
to jump and shout, my optic nerve to tell tall tales, and my mind to
wonder.
Maybe I just have the wrong sort of mind. What if instead of invent-
ing a physical explanation for these lights, I had simply invited them in?
Would they have accepted? I suppose with my bad attitude it might be
impossible to extend an honest invitation. The sad thing is, they are
probably telepathic interdimensional mind readers, in which case there
is no way to fool them with feigned credulity. They’d see right through
me, immediately discovering my impure heart and my weak faith. They
are never going to talk to me.
I really tried watching the sky from the perspective of someone who
believed many conscious entities were up there (hey, wait, I do believe
that). What might I see if I could just get into the right frame?
Is it possible to make yourself believe something? I always wonder
about people who change religion for reasons of convenience. Can you
really just decide like that? I was definitely getting the impression, more
than ever, that when it comes to visible signs of intelligence in the sky,
“believing is seeing.” If part of “trying to see” is “trying to believe,” it’s
easier said than done.
W H E R E ’ S T H E B E E F ?
Stories of strange, unexplained, and often grotesque livestock deaths in
the San Luis Valley go back to the famous case of Snippy the horse.
Everyone in the valley knows some version of the story of poor Snippy,
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whose real name was Lady, who was found dead on September 7,
1967, with strange, fresh wounds. His* skin and flesh had been cleanly
cut from his neck all the way back to his shoulders, leaving nothing but
a skeleton where the front of the horse should have been. There were
no tracks, and no blood on the ground. Strange markings that could
have been caused by the landing pads of a flying saucer were found
nearby. A neighbor reported that she had seen something pass over the
ranch house on the day that Snippy had died. Lady’s owner, Mrs. Bertie
Lewis, told one local paper, “Flying saucers killed my horse!” And thus
a legend was born.
Most of the victims have been cattle. They are usually found with
various parts removed with surgical precision—most often the tongue,
the brain, other soft tissues in the face and upper body, and the genitals
and anus. All of the blood has mysteriously been drained from the bod-
ies, and flies, which usually can’t resist a carcass, stay away from these.
There is sometimes a medicinal smell like embalming fluid. There is
never a trace of the perpetrator, no footprints or tire tracks—almost as
if they dropped out of the sky.
The cattle mutilation phenomenon is not unique to the San Luis
Valley. Similar mutilation epidemics have been reported in Nebraska,
South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kansas, and northern New
Mexico. Investigators have also reported mutilations in South America
/> and Europe.
Skeptics, naturally, debunk these stories, chalking them up to hoax-
ing, credulity, and some faulty reporting and distortion of cattle deaths
by lightning strike or predators. The missing soft tissues, they say, have
been eaten by scavengers. The debunking arguments often resort to the
“why don’t these aliens behave as we think aliens should behave” line
of reasoning.† Much of what is written about the mutilations is sarcas-
tic, and unfortunately some of the ridicule has an obnoxious, elitist
twang—“Those dumb farmers are so unsophisticated that they believe
in things we ivory-tower academics can easily explain away without
ever having to go near a dirt road or a tractor.”
The ufology community is divided over whether cattle mutilations have
*Yes, as far as I can tell, Lady was a boy horse.
†One Encyclopedia of Skepticism, asks, “Why would the aliens take only parts of the cattle, and not the whole animal? Why would they leave incriminating evidence behind, or at least disguise their activity better so that nothing appeared out of the ordinary?”
Have You Seen the Saucers?
349
anything to do with aliens. Some believe they result from experiments that
the government is conducting in secret collusion with extraterrestrials.
They claim that the cattle deaths are often associated with appearances
of mysterious helicopters or other less identifiable craft. Others angrily
denounce the mutilation theorists for damaging the credibility of real
ufology.
Like UFOs, cattle mutilations are in the air in the San Luis Valley.
Even people who deny that there’s anything to it are aware of it as a
local issue or myth, sort of like a famous haunted house or witch.
Everyone knows some version of the story of Snippy the horse and can
tell you an anecdote or two about the mutilations. A mistrust of gov-
ernment and central authority, common in rural Western areas, has
merged with UFO conspiracies in some people’s minds. Some ranchers
suspect ETs, although others think that’s a bunch of manure.
Steeped in the interpretations advocated in skeptics’ magazines, I was
prepared to be unconvinced. I am much more comfortable with the
debunkers’ view that mutilation stories all result from mass hysteria,
sloppy reporting, and misinterpretation. But since I got out of my arm-
chair, knocked on some farmhouse doors, listened to stories of muti-
lated animals, and viewed snapshots with the ranchers who took them,
I cannot dismiss the impression that something strange, twisted, and
hard to understand has actually happened here.
I spoke to a young sheriff who had been first on the scene at one of
the mutilations. The cow had fallen on fresh snow and was precisely
carved, but there were no tracks and no blood. He’d never seen any-
thing like it and has to this day heard no explanation that makes any
sense. I believed that he was simply telling me exactly what he’d seen.*
One of the most interesting people I met is a seventy-two-year-old
rancher named Virginia, who, with her daughter, runs a large cattle
ranch in the valley. Virginia is sharp as a tack, opinionated, and warm
once she decides she likes you. She is not obsessed with or enthralled by
cattle mutilations—clearly, she would rather that the topic had never
entered her life. She is more concerned with running her ranch and her
work with the local historical museum. But when the subject comes up,
*Then he proceeded to regale me with stories about all the times he’s found couples having sex in cars at night around Crestone. He found this topic very entertaining and it was definitely less unpleasant to picture than cattle mutilations.
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she doesn’t shy away from it. Virginia has the dubious distinction of
owning the ranch where one of the most famous and well-documented
cattle mutilations occurred, in 1980.
She invited me into her kitchen and made some coffee, lit a cigarette,
and we got acquainted. The second time I visited her she confessed to
liking me more than she expected to, based on our initial phone conver-
sation when I called and asked if I could come and meet her. I don’t
know what she expected, but I definitely wasn’t pumping her for infor-
mation for an article in either Enquirer, National or Skeptical. She did tell me that she is tired of BBC film crews showing up and wanting to
interview her about her damn bull. When we got around to the topic of
cattle mutilations, she showed me her snapshots of the dead animal.
My eyes were unavoidably drawn to the smooth incisions where the
poor beast’s missing genitals had once been. It was carved up in a way
that looked careful and deliberate—and sick.
Virginia has heard all the debunking arguments and thinks they’re all
bunk. She knows cattle better than most people know people. This
rancher knows what dead cattle look like in various states of decay. She
knows what a lightning burn looks like. She knows how a carcass
appears after it’s been gnawed by predators. She knows her bulls and
she knew that this particular one was alive two days before it was dis-
covered. Nothing will keep flies away from a dead bull, but Virginia
assures me that even the flies wouldn’t touch this carcass for days.
We didn’t dwell on the topic of the mutilations. I didn’t need to make
her go through all the gory details. I had satisfied myself that she and
her story were for real, and that was enough. I did ask her if she had
ever seen a UFO in all her years working out of doors in the valley. Not
a one. She has, however, seen many mirages and strange reflections,
and she speculated at length about optical and psychological phenom-
ena, sounding like one of the sharper writers for the Skeptical Enquirer.
I left Virginia’s ranch completely convinced that there have been mys-
terious, unexplained cattle deaths. The actual number of animals
affected is no doubt much smaller than that reported by the investiga-
tors who have made a cottage industry out of cattle mutilations and
other anomalous phenomena. When people start to write books and
build careers out of this sort of thing, the numbers tend to swell as new
reports, whatever their origin or details or degree of similarity or valid-
ity, get added to the mass of confirming evidence. No doubt a lot of rot-
Have You Seen the Saucers?
351
ten meat is heaped together in the cattle mutilation bin, but there is also
something strange and unexplained.
Virginia doesn’t know what killed her bull and would welcome a
new idea that made sense. Some of her best photos, however, were
“borrowed” by a well-known investigator who distorted her story in
his popular book, changing many details to fit his alien conspiracy the-
ory. She doesn’t seriously entertain the notion that aliens were involved.
The closest she can come to a possible explanation is some sort of per-
verse cult ritual, but she cannot explain the complete lack of vehicle
tracks or footprints, or several other bizarre details. Mostly she just
chalks it up as a
genuine mystery.
After talking to the sheriff and Virginia and a few other folks, it seems
to me that these events are not as easy to explain away as the debunkers
would like to believe. The skeptics may even be doing something they
often accuse their “opponents” of: avoiding the truth out of fear of the
unknown. You can come up with a rational explanation for anything.
This doesn’t mean that your theory is correct, but its mere existence can
be comforting. In the case of the cattle mutilation phenomenon I am not
convinced by any of the “rational explanations.” Yet I see no reason at
all to link cattle mutilations with extraterrestrial life.
There are some mysteries. Are we being unpatriotic to the flag of sci-
ence if we admit there are some mysteries?
W H O G O T T H E B U N K ?
Some ufologists do attempt to apply rigorous methods to documenting
strange phenomena seen in the sky. But they are up against an awful lot,
including the rest of ufology, and we scientists don’t usually talk to them.
Many of us have had bad experiences with aggressive ufologists accusing
us of all kinds of nasty things for not taking their ideas seriously.
If we are being honest, then our scientific attempts to debunk UFOs
must contain caveats. This doesn’t mean that debunking false reports is
not worthwhile. Indeed, it is essential if we are ever going to be able to
recognize the real thing. But sometimes we forget that we don’t really
know much about aliens. Unfortunately, the skeptics’ attitude toward
UFOs often has a moralizing tone, justified by a concern that the
masses will turn back to medieval darkness if we don’t wake them up
by shining the spotlight of science right in their faces.
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One of our defenses against dealing with UFO claims is to lump them in
with all the newage* drowning modern culture, seeping from the ground
in places like Boulder and Sedona. I used to keep a file of especially flaky
New Age literature. My favorite was an article in a Tucson rag by some guy
waxing rhapsodic about the universal vibrations in electricity, which
vibrates everywhere with a frequency of sixty cycles per second, demon-
strating an important global harmonic something-or-other. I found it hilar-
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