The Valley That's Been Watching the Sky Since Before Colorado Was a State |
Called the Bermuda Triangle of the West |
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Documented sightings of unexplained objects in the Valley sky go back to Spanish Conquistadors passing through in the 1560s, who recorded strange lights over the mountains. They continue through the present day.
Researcher and author Christopher O'Brien has spent decades in the Valley cataloguing what he found here — more than 1,000 paranormal events documented since 1992 alone, published across several books including The Mysterious Valley.
O'Brien is not a tabloid sensationalist. He is a methodical chronicler of a place that, for reasons nobody has fully explained, seems to attract an unusual number of unusual things.
The case that put the Valley on the national paranormal map came in September 1967. A three-year-old Appaloosa named Lady — better known as Snippy — was found dead in a pasture about 17 miles from Alamosa.
What investigators found was not a typical livestock death. Her hide had been stripped cleanly from nose to withers. There was no blood at the scene. The nearest hoofprints were 100 feet from the body. A Forest Service ranger who checked the surrounding area with a Geiger counter registered unusually elevated readings for several hundred yards around the carcass. No predator, no poacher, no explanation then and none since.
The Snippy case became one of the most studied animal mutilation events in American history. Her skeleton, after decades in storage, now stands on display at the UFO Watchtower near Hooper.
The Watchtower is its own story. In 2000, cattle rancher Judy Messoline was facing bankruptcy on her Saguache County property when a local jokingly suggested she capitalize on the Valley's reputation and build an observation platform.
She did — a ten-foot tower with a saucer-shaped gift shop, surrounded by a rock garden that psychics later informed her sat over two active metaphysical vortexes.
The joke became a business that has drawn more than 30,000 visitors and logged 304 documented sightings. Messoline herself has personally witnessed 27. She keeps a three-ring binder of handwritten accounts from visitors, and it is very thick.
Whether you believe in any of it or not, the Valley's sky is genuinely extraordinary — dark beyond what most Americans ever experience, vast in a way that tends to make people philosophical, and apparently full of things that are hard to explain. The Valley has been noticing them for 500 years. It's not stopping now.
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