HOOPER, Colo. — The UFO files now being unveiled by the Pentagon, with their videos of darting orbs and photos of floating shapes, do not surprise Larry Messoline one bit. He’s witnessed such oddities himself.
Messoline pulled out his phone on a recent afternoon and pressed play on a video he took two years ago of a blinking light hovering erratically against the inky sky of Colorado’s vast San Luis Valley. “At 52 seconds, it just flashes and goes away. Ready?” said Messoline, clad in a pressed shirt printed with neon aliens. “Boom,” he whispered as the light vanished.
Messoline, 61, is the manager of the UFO Watchtower, a scrappy roadside attraction that rises out of the southern Colorado desert scrub. For 26 years, it has drawn curious road-trippers and a stream of believers who figure that if the truth is out there, it might well show up here. A thick binder on the desk of the gift shop overflows with testimonies and puzzling photos reflecting more than 300 sightings.
Many bear similarities to the declassified materials the Defense Department describes as “unresolved” and is now publishing online in retro Commodore 64-style font. The government files include FBI interviews, NASA transcripts, grainy military videos and law enforcement statements. Announcing the data dump in May, President Donald Trump said the information would allow Americans to “decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
Weeks earlier, a clip of former president Barack Obama declaring “they’re real” when asked about aliens went viral. He later clarified that he “saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Proof of alien existence is also missing from the Trump administration’s disclosures so far, to the disappointment of some UFO enthusiasts who view them as superficial scratches on a “deep state” cover-up. Others, including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, have derided the rollout as a distraction from earthly events like the war in Iran or files related to Jeffrey Epstein. The White House also took flak from immigrant rights groups and some UFO buffs for its new aliens website, which features glowing green text and a “declassified” label — but encourages reports of undocumented immigrants, not flying saucers.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), meanwhile, called the first batch of government files a “drop in the bucket” and assured that “‘Holy Crap’ is coming.”
In this high desert flanked by snowy mountains, the revelations, though murky, have prompted both excitement and it’s-about-time eyerolls. Messoline’s mother, Judy Messoline, opened the watchtower on a lark but says she has since seen 30 UFOs. She is no fan of Trump, but on this policy matter, she approves.
“It is high time that they let the American public know what’s going on,” she said. “There is definitely something happening. And I don’t think it’s from this world.”
Not that Judy Messoline, 81, has been terribly impressed with the files. “I’ve read a lot of them. And it just got to be old hat, because we’ve had it here!”
The UFO Watchtower is not quite Roswell or Area 51, but for many who think we are not alone, it has become a requisite stop on an extraterrestrial circuit. The San Luis Valley is home to the wind-carved Great Sand Dunes National Park, bubbling hot springs, sprawling potato farms, a reptile park with more than 300 alligators — and, over centuries, sightings of confounding phenomena.
In 1967, the valley burst onto the national scene as the site of the first widely publicized livestock “mutilations” — a topic of fascination for the alien-interested — when an Appaloosa horse named Snippy turned up dead in a field, stripped of its hide, its organs carefully removed. Locals speculated about extraterrestrials; the sheriff suspected lightning.
The area also shares features common to many UFO-sighting hot spots, according to a University of Utah study: dark skies and a wide-open Western landscape.
Judy Messoline moved to Hooper in the late 1990s from Colorado’s populous Front Range, planning to trade her work with horses for cattle. She bought acreage, but her effort at ranching was a bust. The terrain was too rocky and dry.
But while working at a convenience store, she heard plenty of stories from farmers about strange things in the sky, and she quipped that someone should open a UFO watchtower. One farmer told her it was a good idea, so she did it.
Tower is a generous word. It is more of a platform, shaped like a U and 10 feet off the ground — sufficient height, Judy Messoline said, to “get off the lay of the land.” Entry costs $5.
“I stand out there daily and say, ‘For god’s sake, Scotty, beam me out of this place. I don’t care where, just get me out of here!’” she said, shaking her head, and only partially joking.
Visitors come from around the world. Some spend all day on the tower, staring at the horizon, Larry Messoline said. Others camp on the property and pull out telescopes. Scientists and employees of a prominent aerospace contractor have stopped by and shared about their own mysterious encounters, he said.
In 2015, half a dozen representatives from the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group showed up — one, Judy Messoline recalled, wore a trench coat and sunglasses. She displays in the gift shop a letter they later sent, thanking her for a UFO-related discussion that was “enlightening and potentially helpful in light of our tasking.” The group, which trained Navy and Marine Corps officers to research some of the military’s “most vexing strategic challenges,” was disbanded a year later.
Outside is the “garden,” an assortment of trinkets left in the dirt by visitors — license plates, Pokémon cards, ballpoint pens. Judy Messoline said some 50 psychics have told her the garden is the site of two energy vortexes, as well as a buried alien mother ship. Her hands tingle when she wanders through it, she said.
Savannah Woldengen, 18, removed a transparent heart charm from her bracelet and set it in a dusty shot glass, an offering she hoped would let otherworldly beings “know I’m here.”
Woldengen said she had only dabbled in the government UFO files, but the visit had inspired her to dig deeper. She didn’t see anything uncanny at the watchtower, but it did not diminish her belief.
“I just think it’s beautiful to hope,” said Woldengen, an art student from Liberty, Missouri. “I just love aliens so much and everything about them.”
Inside, Larry Messoline delivered a short presentation about the watchtower’s crown jewel: the skeleton of Snippy, housed behind plexiglass. After changing hands various times over decades, Judy Messoline purchased the remains in 2021 for $2,000.
“The bones that were exposed looked like they’d been sitting in the sun for over 20 years,” Larry Messoline said, his voice projecting awe. He pointed to a bone. “This cut here was done with such surgical precision.”
A Colorado couple passing by on their way to a nearby ghost town listened quietly. Darrell Koenig, 68, said he had worked at the Buckley Space Force Base as an airplane mechanic for 26 years, and never did he hear the pilots mention spotting anything inexplicable in flight.
Atop the tower, Koenig said, he “didn’t feel the hair go up on the back of my neck.” Nevertheless, he said, “you’d have to be narrow-minded to not believe in something. We can only travel to the moon and back. Think of everything beyond.”
Larry Messoline is a recent convert. “I mocked my mother like crazy for opening this place,” he said.
After decades in the Navy and in law enforcement, he was enjoying life as a retiree in Corpus Christi, Texas, when she called a few years ago and said she needed his help.
Now Larry Messoline is the kind of person who has attended a UFO conference in Scotland and participates in a UFO forum on Facebook whose members, he said, are elated by the release of government files.
He is, too: “At least things are being talked about now,” he said. More talk about UFOs, he figures, means more traffic at the watchtower.
He hopes to revive the UFO conference his mother used to organize at the watchtower, maybe stage a music festival. (His own country album, “UFO Watchtower,” features original tunes titled “Little Green Men” and “The Ballad of Snippy the Horse.”)
But mostly, Larry Messoline is optimistic about more people coming by. They are the best part about what he calls the best job he’s ever had. The conversations at the watchtower may be about aliens, he said, but they have reaffirmed his faith in humanity.
“Nobody’s tried to beat me up, shoot me, stab me, blow me up,” he said. “When you’re in law enforcement, 90 percent of the people you see, you see them at their worst. They come in here, they want to be in here. I get to see them at their best.”
The post A Colorado UFO watchtower has been waiting for the government to catch up appeared first on Washington Post.
