By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
In their last entry in the On the Trail of UFOs series – Dark Sky – Small Town Monsters focused on West Virginia, and the various ways UFO lore expresses itself through the experiences of people living there. In their latest entry – Night Visitors – they move to Colorado, adding cattle mutilation to the mix as they continue their discussion of sightings, abductions, and whether UFOs are military, extraterrestrial, or something else entirely.
That something else? Who knows. Maybe it’s something interdimensional. Maybe it’s something mystical. Maybe the two are the same. The term for it in the literature is “high strangeness.” The coining of this particular phrase is often attributed to the journalist and investigator John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies and myriad other books and articles on UFOs and the paranormal. But if Keel wasn’t the first to utter the phrase, he was certainly the one to popularize the concept and – along with French researcher Jacques Vallee – help shift the UFO conversation away from the extraterrestrial hypothesis and toward something that looked at all the reported events, especially the outliers and the bizarre.
In the high desert, San Luis Valley of Colorado, this strangeness takes the form of local legends that the orbs of light seen in the sky aren’t alien, but are witches. According to the lore presented in the film witches, when they wish to move quickly, transform into balls of light and zip across the sky. Another legend says that if you find the spot where these lights move up into the sky, you’ll find buried treasure. These types of stories are dismissed as outliers and fantasy by those who believe the phenomenon is extraterrestrial, but those who study folklore will recognize patterns here of the sort identified by Vallee in his seminal work Passport to Magonia. And it isn’t just UFO reports as faery tale fodder. There’re also the livestock mutilations, reports of disembodied voices, and an “if you build it, they will come” UFO Watchtower – none of which are folk tales in a traditional sense, but which still reflect the ways folk interpret things they experience around them.
Or there’s the possibility the military conspiracy folks are right, and it’s a government psy-op experiment or a misinterpretation of other covert government programs.
There are folks who report black helicopters near the sites of cattle mutilations, and in conjunction with UFO sightings. But these aren’t normal black helicopters. They often have no identifying marks, and there is one witness in the film who insist the big choppers are completely silent. Another says they’ve seen them disappear into the side of the mountain. Some are convinced there are underground military bases in the abandoned mines found in the mountains ringing the valley, harkening back to a theory raised by Breedlove in Dark Sky that mines are somehow related to these reports. Others agree that the mountains are hollowed out, but believe the occupiers are alien rather than military. Others don’t presume to theorize about the origin of the lights, but can’t deny that they’ve heard about and seen them.
Filmmaker Seth Breedlove and host Shannon LeGro are largely unflinching whether collecting these boiler-plate light-in-the-sky sightings, or more personal and close-up encounters. There is one point, however, where Breedlove registers genuine surprise when the childhood experience shared by a MUFON investigator matches closely that of a UFO witness, right down to the intensely bright lights and disembodied voices heard. It lends credence to the suggestion these phenomena are related, but calls into question the standard explanations of experimental aircraft or even extraterrestrial visitors. It’s all just a little too strange.
Of course, some of it could be all in the heads of the witnesses. Cultural bias and media tropes could explain why folks who have an odd experience tend to interpret or experience it in the same or a similar manner. Another Vallee book, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samidzat, does a fantastic job of showing the similarities between sightings around the globe while also exhibiting how exposure to western pop culture influences the way folks in those interconnected countries interpret what they see or feel. There is no separating the culture we are raised in from the way we interpret the unexplained.
But then there are the things that can be seen and photographed and measured. The lights in the sky, to be sure, but in Colorado and elsewhere out west, the cattle. It’s hard to ignore several hundred pounds of dead heifer or horse with their eyes and internal organs removed. There are folks who have explanations for that too, though. Sometimes an animal can be gone for an entire day or more before it’s noticed missing. It can be even longer before its found. In that time predators can get at the corpses. They will eat away the soft part first – the lips, the tongue, and the eyes. Insect can get inside and eat away at the brain and the organs without showing any incision or ripping as would be seen when coyotes or wolves got at the body. Animals that escape scavengers long enough to swell and bloat can reportedly show rips in the hide – bloodless since the heart has long since ceased pumping – that can be as straight as a ruler.
But these explanations don’t satisfy the ranchers and land-owners that have experienced animal loss. They’ve reported quick, clean, and precise organ removal in animals that were found immediately after death. In one case a body was found and, in the time it took the rancher to fetch help from his house and return to the calf, the body was mutilated. In another case just the spine was removed from under the hide, which wouldn’t be the easiest part for predators to get to. In some instances they’ve noticed a disinfectant or chemical smell. In the original “Snippy the horse” mutilation case the land around the animal was reportedly radioactive.
One impacted ranching family, the Millers, note that their land lies between the 37th and 40th parallels – an alleged corridor of strange activity discussed by Keel in his book Operation Trojan Horse. In addition to animal mutilations, the Millers have noted other activity on their land. They said that researchers who came to their farm registered no background electromagnetic fields at all, which is uncommon.
It was a claim that LeGro tested and verified before they left, though the revelation, she said, didn’t bring her any closer to a clear truth.
“Are we ever going to find the answers?,” LeGro asks. “Probably not.”
But, she notes, the things they have uncovered are someplace to start. And that’s something.
On the Trail of UFOs Night Visitors is available for purchase and streaming now, and while you can watch both Dark Sky and Night Visitors as stand-alone features, they work best as follow-ups to the original eight-episode On the Trail of UFOs series. You can find all of them through your favorite streaming platforms, or through the Small Town Monsters website at smalltownmonsters.com.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
