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Colorado UFOs more common than you might think, author says

Colorado UFOs more common than you might think, author says

The contrail from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is seen from Long Beach, Calif., about 185 miles east from its launch site in Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 22, 2017. A reused SpaceX rocket has carried 10 satellites into space from California, leaving behind it a trail of mystery and wonder. The Falcon 9 booster lifted off from coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base shortly before 5:30 p.m. Friday. It carried the latest batch of satellites for Iridium Communications.
AP Photo | Javier Mendoza

VAIL — Look up on a clear dark night and you’ll see stars and satellites – all the stuff that makes Colorado’s night sky spectacular.

Look closely straight up. There’s this one thing that looks like a satellite, but it’s stationary. It just hangs there. Keep looking and it’s like it wakes up and starts skipping around like a bug on the surface of a pond, or a puppy that’s happy to see you.

Look away and view it in your peripheral vision, it sits still. Look back and it’s a skipping puppy again.

Curious.

Colorado UFOs

Author Richard Estep, born in Britain, lives in Longmont and crisscrossed Colorado interviewing true believers for his 12th and latest book, “Colorado UFOs.”

More Americans believe there’s more intelligent life on other planets than inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway, so lots of people were willing to talk to him.

Estep has been investigating paranormal activity for a quarter century talking to people who say they’ve had close encounters with space aliens.



Like the good folks of Summit County. On Oct. 23, 2014 , Summit County dispatch phones began lighting up with callers who were seeing white shiny objects assuming various formations in the sky over Breckenridge. Law enforcement investigated. So did the military. Their official stance was that neither had any idea what it was.

And that’s the thing about Estep’s work. He does not attempt to answer the question: “Are we alone in the universe?’

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“After interviewing eyewitnesses from all walks of life, I am still no closer to figuring out exactly what I believe lies at the heart of the UFO phenomenon,” Estep writes.

Judy Messoline is more definitive in her perspective. She lives in the San Luis Valley and says she has seen UFOs. She apparently wanted them to feel welcome, so she opened a UFO Watchtower in Hooper.

People seem curious. Messoline says 30,000 people have visited her tower. She wrote her own book, “That Crazy Lady Down the Road.”

Speaking of crazy ladies, one woman in Estep’s book says she’s half-Arcturian – the child of an alien-human marriage.

One man insists that aliens have a base under Denver International Airport. A tunnel links it to the NORAD facility in Colorado Springs.

Local close encounters

Bob Fiske lived in the Vail Valley for decades. He’s well educated, well spoken and is an investigator for the Mutual UFO Network. He patiently points out that if you want to see UFOs, or anything else in the sky, all you have to do is look up.

He saw them with some regularity and cites a string of sightings in May 2009 – seven in five days.

An 18-year old was walking home in Basalt and had a close encounter with a craft and some “entities.”

Someone in Frisco heard a jet going over and saw an F-16 flying low over the valley, chasing something. Looking towards Buffalo Mountain, he spotted a silvery disc hovering.

A skier riding a chairlift at A-Basin at 3:15 p.m. spotted a fast-moving silent craft overhead. There’s a picture of that one on William Puckett’s websiteUFOs Northwest http://www.ufosnw.com/sighting_reports/2009/arapahoeskiarea05072009/arapahoeskiarea05072009.htm. “This was a compelling case because the witness saw the object and took a good photo. I get many reports from people who capture UFO’s on photos, but they don’t see the objects. They find the UFO’s when later viewing the photos,” Puckett said in an email.

The next day, three people reported sightings along the Vail Valley’s I-70 corridor. It started with a 4:30 a.m. sighting in Edwards when a witness saw a disc-shaped flying object with flashing lights. It hovered northwest of the highway, then disappeared to the northwest.

Around 8 p.m. that day, two people in Avon reported a disc with flashing lights that appeared to be over the main entrance to the Beaver Creek Resort. Later that night a woman in Eagle saw brightly flashing strobe lights in the sky that moved around and did not appear to come from any aircraft.

The next night someone in Vail spotted a white cigar-shaped object flying from west to east in the sky north of Vail. A USAF jet may have followed it.

Astronomer Frank Drake put some math to it. Drake’s Equation calculates that some of the billions of planets must surely be occupied. At SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – they’re still looking up and listening.


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