YOUR AD HERE »

UFO over Aspen?

John Colson
Pitkin County correspondent
Vail CO, Colorado

ASPEN, Colorado ” A second Aspenite has reported seeing an unidentified flying object in the skies over Aspen in the early morning hours of Thursday.

Dr. Patricia Hill, a psychologist and host on GrassRoots TV, said Friday that she saw an object moving through the sky over her home in Meadowwood that morning after being awakened by what she described as “some big, bright lights, kind of casting about toward the tops of the trees.”

“I thought at first it might be a car,” she said. “I thought maybe there was a road [up the hill from her home] that I didn’t know about.”



Then the object, which had moved past her house, came back, “but higher,” she recalled. “And I thought, ‘Cars aren’t up in the sky.'”

She said she was not sure of the time of her sighting, but she believes it was at about the same time that Fay Franklin, of Brush Creek Village, reported seeing lights in the sky above her home.

Support Local Journalism



Franklin spotted the lights around 4 a.m. after being unable to sleep and getting out of bed, and said they looked “like somebody was shooting fireworks off up above.” But the object soon took on the appearance of a trumpet, she said, with colored neon lights surrounding it.

Hill, who said she has been interested in UFOs for some time and has served on scientific panels discussing the topic, did not call police. She described the object as glowing with white and red lights, and said she reported the sighting to a friend and fellow UFO researcher at the University of Wyoming, Dr. Leo Sprinkle. Sprinkle could not be reached for comment.

Franklin called the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office around 1 p.m. Thursday to report the sighting, and county dispatchers said they had not received any other reports. A Pitkin County Sheriff’s deputy, Jim Hearn, reported seeing lights in the sky while on night patrol, somewhat earlier than Franklin’s sighting but in roughly the same place.

He said, however, that what he saw was a plane.

The Pitkin County Airport flight control tower did not return a telephone call concerning the sightings.

jcolson@aspentimes.com


Support Local Journalism