National Park After Dark - Lights in the Sky: Great Sand Dunes National Park

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

For this week’s adventure, we are heading to somewhere that prides itself on exploration of the park after dark. Bring those night vision goggles and an open mind as we travel to Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park where we discuss one of the state’s longest running unsolved mystery - the case of Snippy the horse, lights in the sky above Colorado, and contemplate the age-old question – are we alone?For the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials at:Instagram: @‌nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @‌nationalparkafterdarkSupport the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page!For a full list of our sources, visit http://npadpodcast.com/episodes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When's the last time you looked at the night sky? I mean, really looked. If you can't remember, you're like most of us here on Earth, ants on a giant ant hill, scurrying around, busy as can be in our own little bubbles. But let's change that. Take out your comfiest blanket and spread it out over the sand. Lie on your back and stretch out your arms. Feel the grains trickle through your fingers.

Did you know that for each grain of sand on Earth, there are roughly 10,000 stars? Now look around you at the towering dunes as they dwarf you. These are the tallest dunes in North America, holding 4.8 billion cubic meters of sand. Now allow your gaze to wander upwards. Fix your eyes on the twinkling specks of light sprinkling the dark skies like confetti. Light that spends years traveling through our galaxy before it is visible to us here on Earth. You see, looking into the night sky is actually like looking into the past. The light from Proxima Centurai, the closest star to us, is located 4.24 light years away.

That means the light you see from it now was emitted over four years ago. Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado is one of the best places on Earth to observe the night sky, and an even better place to ponder it. Just how expansive is the universe? How did it begin? Does it end? And most importantly, are we alone? Welcome, Earthlings, to National Park After Dark.

Welcome back, everyone, to National Park After Dark. My name is Danielle. And my name's Cassie. We hope you all had a great weekend, spent some time outside, enjoyed the weather, went camping, went to a national park, went to state park. I hope you enjoyed your time. I know Danielle did. I had a great time. I'm not having a great time right now because I'm in the middle of a heat wave.

It's 100 degrees. at 940 at night. But this last weekend was beautiful. My family came out and we did the national parks in Washington. They'd been out and had done Mount Rainier several years ago. And I've done all the parks before, but it was new for them to visit North Cascades and Olympic. So seeing a national park or any place really through new eyes is like kind of seeing it for the first time yourself because you just get like that excitement again. So it was a really good time. I think the highlight for my mom was definitely the whole rainforest.

The highlight for me actually wasn't a national park, but it was a national historic site in the San Juan's. So all in all, it was a great vacation. Went by too fast, of course. But there'll be others. Your pictures looked beautiful, look like a good time. Yeah, it was great weather. I mean, my stepdad was like, okay, so I thought you said that Washington was all rain and fog, and it is beautiful.

It was literally, it was like 75, not a cloud in the sky the entire week. I'm like, I swear to God, it's usually not like this. I swear, it usually rains here. And you had a great birthday. I did. I went up and we camped. We took out the. schoolie for the first adventure and we went paddleboarding and hiking and we slept on our bed

inside our schooly and we got our electric running and our fridge worked and we used our motorcycles and yeah it was good it's a good 30th birthday so yeah welcome to 30 it's it's good so far you were Right. Week one, going well. Week one. Really good. So today, as our intro alluded, we're going to be going to Colorado. One of my favorite places on Earth. I lived there for several years after college. And I visited this national park. Actually, by chance and kind of accident, I was out with two co-workers and we were going to another wolf sanctuary out in Westcliffe, Colorado, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere.

and on the way, we saw signs for great sand dunes, and we decided to go. We were not prepared. I mean, we did no sort of hiking excursions, any sort of thing. We literally had like an old inflatable inner tube in the back of my Jeep, and we tried to sandboard down the dunes and not very successfully. But we hung out there for a couple, you know, a couple hours and then went home, but it's definitely a place. that I want to return to for sure. And from your beginning of your intro, it sounds like we might be talking about some extraterrestrials today.

Again, another favorite of mine. It's like this is like the dream episode for me. Like favorite place, favorite subject. It's all coming together. We've been waiting for this episode since episode one. I know. I know. Everyone's like disappearances, murder, fatal accidents.

I'm like, okay, yeah, I love that. But let's get to the. aliens. About the area a little bit. So when I went, I really love the area right away. It's pretty hard not to. The dunes are beautiful. The way they kind of push up against the mountains, and they create the stark contrast of sand and the mountains is really beautiful. But what got me first was the signs. So on the way to the park, I noticed cattle crossing signs because it's a huge ranching community out there. So, you know, the triangular yellow signs that have like a cow on them just to alert you of cattle in the area. Yeah. So, you know, whatever. Pass by a few.

And then it caught my eye. I was like, what was that on that one? That looked a little weird. And then I see another one and their UFOs in the corner above the cows. You're like, what is this? Where are we? This is really exciting. What's happening? Right. So I'm like, okay, what's going on? Because again, I was new to the area. I certainly didn't know. So as there was by, I'm getting more excited. And then I start seeing these life size cutouts of aliens on the side of the road. And I was like, all right, my like for the San Luis Valley is turning into love pretty quickly here. So like I said, I've been really looking forward to doing an episode regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life. And I do want to. preface it and say the possibility because I want to keep an open mind to all forms of opinions. However, mine is pretty solidified. So I'm a firm believer. And part of the reason for that is, you know, a lot of little girls grow up, especially from the 90s, hearing like fairy tales, Disney was huge, dressed up for like princesses for Halloween.

That was not me. One of my first, first Halloween costumes I can remember. My dad got me a blacked out track suit from Walmart. About a hundred little green glow sticks. You know, the ones that you crack and they light up. Yeah. And a ton of Velcro and stuck them literally all over me from like my shoulders all the way down to my feet. and then he plopped an alien mask over my head and gave me one of those little voice-changing things

that changes your voice into like a robotic voice and literally just let me loose on the town. Like be free, wild one. So like I'm like this little Martian running around. He used to, instead of telling me like fairy tale stories, he told me Betty and Barney Hill abduction. We went to bed talking about Charity of the Gods, which was a big, extraterrestrial book. Ancient Aliens was always on TV. I've been to Area 51. I did the extraterrestrial highway. I've been to the UFO festival in New Hampshire that Exeter has every year. There's a UFO festival in New Hampshire every year? Yeah, in Exeter.

What does that look like? What is the UFO festival? Let me tell you. So I actually have a picture of Chaska, my dog, one of my dogs, next to the sign that says UFO. festival. And so they decorate downtown with like all green little Martians and everything's alien themed. And they have speakers come to talk about UFOs. And last or not last year, maybe three years ago now, Betty and Barney Hill's granddaughter or whatever went and spoke. So it's like just like a little festival because there's a lot of sightings in and around that area. So they just kind of have a festival every year. That's really fun. And I have never, ever heard of that ever. Well, now you know. Allegedly, this area has one too with COVID and all that. I don't know if it's going to

happen. But with that upbringing and just growing up in that environment, I was always encouraged to contemplate those big questions. Are we alone in the universe? Is there other life forms out there? So today, we're going to contemplate that together, and we are going to do that on a trip to Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park. As always, let's start with a little bit of information on the park itself. Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve is located in Colorado on the eastern end of the San Luis Valley. The park was originally established as Great Sand Dunes National Monument in 1932. However, Congress authorized a boundary change and it was redesign. needed as a national park in 2004. The national park protects over 107,000 acres, and the adjacent preserve

protects an additional 41,000. The park is pretty unique because, obviously, as its name states, it has sand dunes, and they are the biggest in North America, with some reaching over 700 feet. The dunes themselves cover an area of about 30 square miles and are estimated to contain about 5 billion cubic meters of sand. The dunes themselves were created over tens of thousands of years as sediment from the surrounding Sangre de Cristo Mountains filled the valley. Ancient lakes within the valley receded, leaving exposed sand, which was blown towards the mountains, which eventually formed the dune fields that we see today. The southern Ute tribe, the Navajo, and the Apache, all have ties within the park that date back thousands of years. And it wasn't until the late 1600s when the

first Europeans were recorded entering the area. In the early 1800s, the first known writings about Great Sand Dunes appear in U.S. Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pikes Journals. And for our Colorado listeners, if that name sounds a little bit familiar to you, it's because this is the man that Pikes Peak, which is one of Colorado's 14ers, was named after. Although it was known as SunMass by the Ute people. Throughout the following years, the area was traveled and explored by non-natives. The valley attracted ranchers, farmers, and miners in the 1900s, and a real threat of gold and silver mining destroying the dunes was becoming a really big reality, and a lot of local residents were getting worried. As a little bit of a throwback to episode 8, which we discussed women in our

National Parks. It was the members of the philanthropic educational organization, which was a women's organization with a primary focus on providing educational opportunities for female students worldwide, who sponsored a bill to Congress asking for the area to be granted as a national monument. Activities in this national park are plentiful. Offroading, hiking, camping, sand sledding, and horseback riding are all super popular here. There's even a natural beach in the park. Medano Creek runs through the dunes formed by snow melt in the high mountains that pools into an alpine lake and then cascades down the mountains where it forms a stream through the dunes. The water doesn't really get that high, maybe about ankle depth or so, but you can splash around it or even ride an intertube down it when surge flows are created by underwater sand ridges that'll build up and break down creating little waves. But when the sunsets and the stars have their turn to light up the sky, another opportunity arises.

Although the park was granted the designation of an international dark sky park in 2019, it has been a hot spot for astronomers and amateur star grazers alike for generations. The dry air, high elevation, and lack of light pollution all make the park an exceptional dark sky location. The park even hosts different night programs. There were two that I found really interesting and I kind of just want to go just for these. So the first one is one that the National Park Service collaborates with NASA for and it teaches how we can use what we know about our parks to make connections to other planets within our solar system. And there's a constellation tour right after it. The other one is called surviving quicksand and other perils. And the description

for this talk and on the park website says, come learn how to survive quicksand as well as other perils. We'll examine the psychology of survival in any situation and how anyone can use these tips to survive. Survival stories will be shared, as well as some survival star stories and tips if the clouds permit. That would be one. I would be all over.

That sounds really interesting. The park has a phrase. half the park is after dark. Clearly, great Sand Dunes National Park has embraced the night sky and encouraged others to look up and outside of themselves, but they aren't the only ones. The community surrounding the park is just as, if not more, enthusiastic about space and those who may visit us from its far-off reaches. To understand why this area is so alien-obsessed, we have to take a step back in time. On a September day in 1967 in the San Luis Valley, Harry King was worried about a horse. Lady, a three-year-old Appaloosa, had not come back to his ranch like usual. She was described as a

creature of habit and was always counted on to return back to the ranch at night for food, water, and her treats. But after she didn't show up for two days, Harry became concerned. Lady was his sister, Nellie's horse, and he knew that she would be upset if anything happened to her, so he set out, determined to find her. But what he found would catapult rural Alamosa, Colorado onto the front pages of newspapers around the country and would become one of Colorado's greatest unsolved mysteries. Lady was dead, that was for sure. Harriet found her in a field about a quarter mile away from the ranch house and left her without disturbing anything to notify Nellie. Nellie and her and her husband arrived the next day and were taken out to the site where Lady had fallen. What they discovered, though,

was puzzling. Lady was laying on her side, with only the bones of her neck and skull exposed. The bones appear to be sun bleached, as if they had been lying out in the sun for years, but the rest of her body appeared to be intact. No blood was noted either on her body or around it. There were no signs of predation by vultures or coyotes, and it was not in any stage of decomposition. There was no blow or foul odor noted. However, there was a smell in the air. It just wasn't decomp. It was that of chemicals.

Described as a smell similar to acetone, and it lingered in the air surrounding the horse. Surrounding her body were several circular burn marks, described as scorch or exhaust marks. And moving further away from her body, they discovered. her footprints, which abruptly ended about 100 feet away from her remains. About 100 yards away, a shrub was discovered to be nearly flattened, with six small circular indentations in the ground arranged in a circle. There are a varying report stating that Nellie had either found some gelatin-like globs of material, along with a piece of metal covered in horsehair, or she had reached down and actually put her hand on Lady. But either way, it said that after touching,

whatever it was that she did touch, her hands began to burn. All of this seemed way too strange to simply brush off. So Nellie reported it to the sheriff, Ben Phillips. He quickly declared that the horse had been killed by lightning, despite the lack of storms in the area at the time, and the fact that he never even visited the site where ladies' remains were. Word of ladies spread quickly in the tight-knit community of Alamosa, and the lightning strike conclusion didn't really sit right with the community either, mainly because they had another theory. Residents and visitors alike have been reporting otherworldly phenomena. A college student had stated he had seen a strange object sitting in a field. But when he tried to approach it, his rear tires blew out. Another man

said that he had been followed by an object that resembled a top. And yet another came from a law enforcement agent. Two sheriff deputies had been followed by an orange globe. Nellie admitted to seeing something in the skies almost nightly, but didn't elaborate on what that was exactly. Even Harry and Nellie's 87-year-old mother Agnes had seen some strange objects flying over the house the date that lady disappeared. But the people of Alamosa, circa 1967, weren't the only ones in their otherworldly claims. Native tribes of the area, particularly the Ute, who called that land home prior to European settlement, often told stories of of flying seed pods and star people.

As the investigation continued, several days later, an arrest was made in Great Sand Dunes National Park. Park officials had arrested Dr. John Altshire, an award-winning pathologist, and a significant contributor to the study of medicine. He had been found in the park trespassing at night, and upon his arrest, he begged to keep his name out of records. He was, after all, a prominent and well-respected doctor. He was afraid his career would be ruined if word got out about why he had been in the park at night. He was looking for UFOs.

Great Sand Dunes National Park was a hotbed for UFO sightings at the time. And Dr. Alter knew that. That's why he had chosen to sit on the dunes and stare into the sky that night. He later revealed what exactly he had seen prior to his arrest. He says, About two to three in the morning, I saw three very bright white lights moving together slowly between the Sangre de Cristo mountain tops. They were definitely not the illusion of stars moving.

At one point, I thought they were coming right towards me because the lights got brighter. Then suddenly, they shot upwards and disappeared. At the time, I was both elated and disbelieving in a way. I knew that the lights were not my imagination, that the stories of UFOs were true. It's funny that you're telling this story today because I was just hanging out with one of my friends today who's in the military. in the Navy and she goes out on naval ships for months at a time. One of my family members asked her if in her unit and her area of people were talking about UFO sightings, especially because of everything that's been going on recently. And she said it's been going on for a long time. She can

remember eight years ago when it was going on. And she was actually out on deployment. And she was like, I don't know if it was lack of sleep or what, but there were several times. where I saw unidentified lights, aircrafts in the sky that were gone in a blink of an eye. And she said that she saw it several times and she's like, maybe it was my lack of sleep. Maybe I was imagining it. But it certainly happened. And there's definitely rumors and people in the military talk about it all the time and have seen stuff as well. Recently, obviously, like you said, with everything that's going on with the government declassifying information,

about unidentified aerial phenomena, there is a lot to get excited about. But especially when it comes from people within the military, it does add an extra layer of credibility. Not to say that just anybody who sees something unexplainable, you laugh at them. I mean, historically, people have said they've seen UFOs or believe in UFOs have been kind of written off. But I think when it comes from military personnel, there is that extra little bit of credibility that people kind of give them a little bit more consideration and contemplation. There is a, if anybody's interested, Joe Rogan did an episode with Lieutenant Fravor of the U.S. military and his experience with UFOs. And it's a really interesting episode. It's like three hours long. They get into a lot of different stuff. But he does,

Lieutenant Fravor does speak about his experience, seeing UFOs out during different flights and things like that. So anyways, that's really interesting. And what a coincidence that you were just talking about that. Yeah, literally today and now we're doing this episode. So Park officials soon learned that other than being an amateur UFO hunter, Dr. Alter was also an expert in hematology. And more specifically in the study of blood coagulation, they offered him a get out of jail free card in exchange for his help with the mysterious case of Lady. He agreed, and he was directed to Harry King's Ranch. He later recalled being amazed by what he saw.

He stated that ladies' lungs, heart, brain, abdominal organs and thyroid were all missing and had appeared to have been removed with extreme precision. The skin was sliced cleanly, and the edges of the cuts were dark in color. Stranger, he noted, was the complete lack of blood. He said, I have done hundreds of autopsies. You can't cut into a body without getting some blood. But there was no blood on the skin or the ground. No blood anywhere.

The outer edges of the skin were cutt firm, almost as if they had been cauterized by a modern-day laser. But there were no such cauterizing laser technologies like that in 1967. So this horse was missing all of its organs. and was there still blood in the horse's body? No blood. Based on these reports, there is no blood at all. Wow. How?

Yeah. What does that? How do you explain that? Well, give me a realistic explanation that's not an extraterrestrial. What other explanation are they? Well, it's coming at you. Okay. We got to play both sides of the fence here.

So likely through the National Park Service, word of the same. situation in Alamosa made its way to the U.S. Forest Service who had dispatched an agent with a Geiger counter. His investigations revealed unusually high radioactivity in the area of ladies' remains, although the source of that was actually never determined. Next came the aerial phenomenon research organization, or ARPO. News of the possible alien mutilation reached a group called the Condon Committee, a group funded by the U.S. Air Force from 1966 to 1968 at the University of Colorado, whose purpose was to investigate reports of UFOs. Lights in the sky, federal agents, and mutilated farm animals was enough to earn the story the front page on newspapers cross-country.

Even reporters from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the London Times arrived at the ranch to get their own slice of the story. And amidst the chaos, Lady had been misnamed in a report as snippy. And so she's lived on in the history books as snippy. News and media outlets from Colorado and beyond drew conclusions, spat out theories, and posed unanswered questions to the public, which all served up some not-so-distant memories.

The Roswell incident of 1947 was still fresh in a lot of minds and hadn't occurred that far off, if you remember, it occurred in New Mexico. Fuel was added to the fire as another potential UFO account came in. Superior Court Judge Charles E. Bennett and his wife, both from Denver, claimed that they witnessed three reddish-orange rings in the sky that maintained a triangular formation, moved at high speed, and made a humming sound. While a lot of people jumped on the UFO bandwagon, not ever, was convinced. The ARPO reached out to a pathologist named Dr. Robert Adams, who agreed to take a look at lady, aka Snippy. He discovered she had a leg infection due to two small caliber bullet wounds in her flank and theorized that someone had slit her throat to put her out of her misery, after which scavengers such as birds and coyotes, along with different bacteria, were responsible for the absence of her organs. The absence of

tissue on the head had exposed the skull to the air, and the combination of that and the warm temperatures liquefied the brain and evaporated the liquid. He concluded in his report, I know it's going to pop the bubble, but the horse was not killed by a flying saucer. It should also be mentioned that the origin of the exhaust marks found around the horse's body could not be confirmed, and it is theorized that the dark coloration of the quote-unquote scorch marks could have been dried blood. And there has never been confirmed evidence as for the reason of the elevated radiation levels in the area. So that is his theory of what happened to snippy. I'm confused because the first person said that the precision of the organs being removed

was just exact and how does an scavengering animal that comes across a dead horse neatly pick and cut out every organ and she only had slit she only had missing areas like her skin wasn't cut open except for around her neck right right and her skull post a picture of of her when they found her and obviously based on this description and it's graphic but you'll literally see from the base of her neck is completely it's sliced like it's not jagged it's not like an animal tore into it and it's shredded it is very precise a very precise cut and from her neck up is completely just bone just bone and everything from the neck down is fully intact and again I mean this picture these pictures were taking in 1967 it's not the highest quality

pictures, but it's pretty clear that there is a stark difference in those two areas. It does not show her abdominal cavity or anything like that. But based on these two reports, they are wildly different, and they are coming from two experts. So it is kind of difficult to discern, you know, what happened and what's true. Yeah. Like you said, they are both experts. And I'm just thinking I watch a lot of The Instagram page, nature is metal, and they're animals ripping apart other animals. And I just can't imagine if the first report is correct where all of the organs were precisely removed and she, her skin was sliced. There's no animal that would do that.

They rip apart with their teeth and that just doesn't make any sense to me. If the first report was correct, the second report makes no sense to me. Yeah, there's nothing clean or precise about animals scavenging on other animals. There just isn't. And I find it interesting that the lack of blood situation, I think that's what he was most. The first expert whose area of study was is blood and blood coagulation. Like, I think that's what really surprised him just because, like he said, that's his area of expertise and the fact that there is no blood whatsoever.

But then there's the theory. The second guy said, well, the scorch marks could have been dried blood. It's like, well, did no one think to test that? Like, I just, I don't know. It's, it's hard to decipher. But also the horse would have a ton of blood. How are scorch marks all of the horse's blood? Yeah, that's a good point.

Like, just individually little, like, yeah. It's almost like this horse was embalmed, like, or, organs removed, bloods removed. But how? Why? How did this happen? I'm so intrigued by this. I've never heard of this before. So I'm like, my mind's blown right now. So even though Dr. Adams did release his report and his findings and his theory of what happened to Snippy, it did not stop the rumors. And if anything, it may have fueled them. So supporters of the UFO theory, called it out as a government cover-up. They pointed to the fact that Dr. Adams was hired by the condom committee,

which was funded and supported by the government. So their stance was that the government, their best interest, was to downplay the UFO reports and to shoot down the possibility that the horse's death was from, you know, another world. That would explain why his report was so wildly different from the report before, too. It could be. Like a government conspiracy going on here. So that actually sparked my memory to tying it back into Roswell that had happened a handful of years before.

If you're not familiar or anybody else isn't familiar, but it's a pretty iconic story of the crash, alleged crash of the UFO. And there was even reports that there were a couple bodies recovered. the government's official report was that it was a weather balloon. So you can take that for what it was or what it is. So the government cover-up thing was just one theory. And the UFO theory was obviously prominent. But there were others as well. Satanic cults popped up.

Somebody even threw out fire ants were responsible. And someone threw out the possibility that she had gotten entangled in some barbed wire. and that's why she had such a uniform slice on her neck. But she wasn't wrapped up in barbed wire. So that kind of to me was like, okay, I don't understand that. Did the barbed wire remove her organs after two and her blood? This is clearly not barbed wire. Yeah.

So that's the thing. I mean, people are going to throw out logical. explanations if they don't want to believe that it was due to UFOs. Years later, in 1975, Senator Floyd K. Haskell claimed there had been 130 mutilations in Colorado alone and even reached out to the FBI for their assistance in helping reduce the fear of extraterrestrials that was growing in the state and beyond. So by this time in the 70s, animal mutilations had been reporting in the states surrounding Colorado, including Texas, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Montana. After being poked, prodded, and gawked over, Snippy's body was removed from the field.

Local veterinarian Wallace Leary boiled the remaining tissue off of her body, re-articulated the skeleton, and mounted it on a metal platform. She spent some time on display in front of the Alamosa Chamber of Commerce, in a private museum, in an abandoned building, and a building, on a local ranch, and then even on eBay, and the sellers were asking $50,000 for her. And when no one coughed up that asking price, the listing was removed. And as of today, she's probably sitting in a storage garage somewhere. Wow, that is strange. It is very strange.

That's the story of snippy. It's kind of a story that has divided the community and anybody who hears about it. because everyone has an opinion on what really happened to her. But like I said, it's one of the greatest mysteries of the 60s in Colorado. No one really knows what happened to her. And I think that's part of the, you know, UFO magic because a lot of people out there want to believe. Yeah. And, okay, so here are the options.

It was barbed wire. Okay, we'll check that. We'll cross that one off. It was a Fire ants. It was fire ants And I mean, I really hate being bit by them And they've done some damage to me before

But I'm going to remove them from the list of possibilities For all the organs being removed by fire ants And then we're going to go over to the satanic cult Because that one is like, okay, I would be so upset if I had a horse in a satanic cult came in and murdered my horse, drained its blood, and stole its organs. So what did my horse do to you, first of all? But that one feels a little bit more believable than all the other options. Certainly, yeah.

I mean, I was just watching a few weeks ago when Sons of Sam came out on Netflix and they talked a lot about Satanic and a lot of things being blamed on satanic cults. But they did say that in this certain area, there was a lot of satanic cult activity. And they had sacrificed a lot of dogs, like people's pets. And a lot of dog remains were found in this one area. So, I mean, I know what happens. But it just seems so odd, especially in such a small, tight knit community with not a lot of other, if any, reports of satanic activity and animal sacrifice in the area at the time.

That, to me, makes it seem a little less likely. But definitely, it is definitely above the fire ants and barbed wire situation in my mind. Out of curiosity for, because you said that there were reports of other animals that's happening to in the area, you said in New Mexico and Utah and Montana, was it the same situation where they were finding these animals with their organs removed and their blood gone or varying. So not everyone was the same exact thing, but a lot of them just had a lot of strange, you know, you have to, you have to remember, these are ranchers.

They do this for a living. It's not like they had never seen a natural death on the ranch or a depredate, a depredation by, you know, wolves, coyote, whatever, um, other large predators. like something about these deaths of cattle, horses, other farm animals have made them question what happened and have potentially pointed to UFO activity because it's just so strange, whether it's, you know, scorch marks or certain organs missing or precision in different cuts. Yeah, so that would be my best guess. I didn't do a deep dive into all the different reports, but just,

based on what I've heard and seen growing up and watching all these alien and UFO specials and stuff, that seems to be the consensus that the deaths are strange. Yeah. And like you said, that's a good point. For ranchers, they have seen this before. So something about all of these sparked their interest of something strange happened here. Right. And there is a book.

I'm going to, I'm terrible. while I didn't write it down. I will link it in the show notes and I'll put it on the Instagram post. But there is a author who did a deep dive on snippy and a lot of other mutilations in the area like you just asked about. And they wrote a book specifically regarding potential UFO related cattle and farm animal mutilation. So if this is your thing and you really want to learn more about it, I will add that in. Well, I certainly think that it was, I'm leaning towards the extraterrestrials just because there were people who said that they saw these weird orange lights in the sky that night that

the horse went missing and then. Yeah. Your thing is the blood. You're like, what is going on with blood? The blood and the organs. I'm like, who did this? Well, the biggest thing for me, or not the biggest thing, but something that I found really interesting is when they talked about where the incision.

or slices where the skin was removed, a quote unquote, was how it was dark in color, like it was cauterized. And just being, you know, in the veterinary field, when we see something being cauterized off, I can picture it in my mind.

I can picture the tool used to cauterize a piece of skin or tissue off. And the way that the skin that's left looks. So when I read that, I just, to me, it just kind of brought it all together. Yeah, when you said it looked cauterized, I immediately had that picture in my mind of what that looks like. So that's a good point too. Yeah. So although Snippy Story reached its peak in the 60s and 70s, the community surrounding the Great Sand Dunes National Park area has taken UFO culture really seriously up until today.

One woman, Judy Mezzaline, has even made it her life's work. Located right off of Highway 17, about 30 miles from Great Sand Dunes, stands the UFO Watch Tower. A small, silver dome-shaped building, surrounded by an elevated walking platform, stands off of a dirt road. Its remote location devoid of light pollution makes it an ideal location to study the cosmos. People from all over the world have stopped here to try their hand at scanning them. the sky. Just last summer, the watchtower welcomed over 5,000 visitors. It started in 1995, when Judy and her husband moved to Alamosa from Golden. They purchased land it attempted to raise cattle. After almost five years and no real success in the cattle business, they ditched that

business venture. Judy got a job at a gas station in nearby Hooper, and it was there where she heard the locals speaking about UFOs. People were seeing them everything. After a while, she joked that the town needed a UFO watchtower. With the cattle ranch kaput but still owning the land and not wanting to sell it, that joke became a reality. Some were skeptical, some were interested, and others were flat out mean about it, but over the years it has proven to be a wildly successful venture. Since opening in 2000, Judy has given dozens of interviews and has been featured in numerous television programs. The inside of the dome is decorated in photos, many taken within Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Newspaper clippings and letters scatter the walls as well. Next to the tower itself is a rock garden, nicknamed the Vortex Garden, as it is said to have powerful energy. Sculptures of aliens and Bigfoot stand tall, surrounded by trinkets and offerings left by visitors such as toys, jewelry, clothing, books, and figurines. skeptics are never too far away, as usual, and some attribute the strange sightings to nearby military installations such as Peterson Air Force Base out in Colorado Springs, and they do a lot of development and testing in the area. Remember UFO or a lot of people now, the terminology is kind of shifted to UAP, unidentified aerial phenomenon. That doesn't exclusively mean it's

extraterrestrial in origin. It just means exactly what it says. It's aerial phenomena that you can't identify. Some even flat out refused that there is anything to be seen but stars. But Judy isn't deterred. And she says their remarks don't bother her. And she stands firm on her own personal accounts of UFO sightings, as well as those claimed by visitors at the watchtower, which at this point number over 150. Judy has seen several of her own sightings. One night, she recalled, seeing what she initially thought was a shooting star, moving across the tops of the sand dunes. However, instead of fading away, it stopped abruptly right over the mountains, sat still for a few moments, and then shot straight upwards and disappeared. People have long speculated why this area

of the San Luis Valley, also known as the Bermuda Triangle of the West, in particular, has been a hotbedded reports and sightings. Some speculate it's due to the vast, remote, and scarcely populated. landscape, while others believe that the valley has spiritual properties, and others just say that the crazy sightings is due to crazy people. Judy thinks it's due to the geothermal properties of the valley. So if you're headed to the Great Sand Dunes National Park and want to scribble your name into the guest book, the watchtower is open daily and you can even camp there. I think that we have all had our fair share of UFO stories, whether they were passed down from family members, heard through friends, seen on TV or in the movies. But the thing about these stories, the legends, the accounts,

debunkings, government conspiracies and cover-up theories, whatever they may be, we all have to decide for ourselves what we want to believe. So the next time you're out and you find yourself in the great Sand Dunes National Park, boarding down the dunes, hiking in the mountains, or splashing around in the creek, don't forget to look up. I loved that episode. It was it was due. It was due to go into that. And I'm so happy that we have talked about extraterrestrials. Because like you said at the beginning, you're a believer. I am 100% a believer. I don't know what it is out there, but there's no way that I believe that we are the only thing in the entire universe that's like a living creature. There's just no way. At first, growing up, I just kind of took the stories to heart just because my dad was telling me

them, you know, like why I looked up to my dad and I took his word as gospel. And as I got older, you know, that's sentimental to me. But as I've gotten older and really looked at it logistically, I still feel the same way, but just for different reasons. It's not just because my dad told me so. It's because mathematically, like, probability wise with all that, you know, that statistic that I've actually heard Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about before with like for every grain of sand, there's 10,000 stars and each star, like our sun is a star. So for every one of those 10,000 stars for every single grain of sand, there's all these potential planets that may harbor life. And then going off of that, like if you look at Earth, humans are just the blink of

an eye in comparison to the life that Earth has had. And Earth is relatively a baby compared to other planets in other solar systems. It's just mind boggling. And so to think that we are the only, the only intelligent life forms or any life forms period out there, I think mathematically that's very unlikely. So do I believe that UFOs are out here abducting people? And left and right and doing tests on Lady the Horse and this and that, you know, I don't know, but I do believe that there is other intelligent life forms out there that no far greater than what we do have been around a lot longer. And I think that maybe they're watching us in some sort of way and observing us.

That's always been my kind of thought, too, is that they are kind of watching us and observing us and seeing what we do. And maybe they've decided that they don't want to actually meet us. And they're just observing all the horrible decisions we're making as a population. And they're like, we're going to watch these from afar. And, uh, well, because if you think about it, I mean, how, what do we do to other species that we find that meet the parameters of what we have identified as intelligence, science of intelligence? We study them. We study them. We study their social groups and complex social structures. We study what they eat, what their life is like. We study them and observe them from afar to learn more about them and try not to interfere.

And I think that if we as the human race went out into space had the technology to go out to space and reach a planet that had life forms that resembled us in a way, but were far less superior or intelligent or haven't caught up to us quite yet to where we are. We would want to observe the hell out of them. We'd be like, what's going on over here? What are they doing? We want to just see what's going on with them. We're not going to interfere. We want to study them. And I think maybe that could be potentially what's going on with other life forms regarding us on Earth. But what do I know? I'm just a veterinary technician.

So don't come at me. I feel like this is like a hole that we could dive so deep into. But end of the day, we both believe that there is our life out there. And this episode was really cool. I'm glad we got to dive into this. That's it for this week. I hope you guys enjoyed a little bit of a change up. You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at National Park After Dark.

you can go to our website and p-a-d-d-podcast.com. Please, wherever you're listening, go ahead and subscribe, rate and review our podcast that really helps us out a lot. Also, Patreon, we've had a lot of additional campfire stories. So if you have caught up, there is more, and it's on Patreon. So if you want to catch up on some bonus episodes that are not released on our regular schedule, then you can head over to Patreon. You can find that either through our Instagram National Park After Dark. There's a link there or through our website. And then lastly,

if you do have an experience of your own UFO or not within a national park that you'd like to share with us, please feel free to do so. We really look forward to reading your emails. And you can send us one at NPAD podcast at gmail.com. That is the end for this week. We'll see you all next week, so in the meantime, enjoy the view. But watch your back. Bye, everyone. Let's look like a cruise missile type of thing. Moving really fast, right over the top of them. Right on this position here, straight ahead in between. There it is again. Watch, straight ahead off my flash right there. There it is. Hey, I see it too. What is it? We don't know, sir.

I'm sure you have a giant. Yeah, it's a strange, small red light. You'll see how maybe a quarter to I'll maybe further out. That's what you're just. The leg is gone now. It was approximately 120 degrees. Is it back again? Yes, sir. There is no doubt about for some type of strange flashing red light.

There's yellow. I saw yelotting it too. Weird. It appears that you may be moving a little bit this way? Yes, it's probably that has been. Yellow? It's coming this way. It is definitely coming this way.

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