Scooting through Hooper last week in the San Luis Valley, I whizzed past the UFO Watchtower erected in the year 2000. One of America’s roadside curiosities, only to be outdone southbound by the Colorado Alligator Farm, the Watchtower incorporates a longstanding belief the Valley constitutes an inland Bermuda Triangle attractive to alien visitors. UFO sightings, livestock mutilations and dancing lights have been reported nearby for half-a-century. To the best of my knowledge, none were attributed to viewers scanning the skies from the Watchtower itself. An attached tourist shop used to sell gangly “Made in China” green plastic alien novelties.

Fascination with UFOs follows a cyclical pattern in American lore. Triggered initially in 1947 when the Army Air Corps, soon to become the Air Force, reported a crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico. Within days, this report was withdrawn in favor of a downed weather balloon. It was always a little puzzling to understand how a balloon could have been mistaken for a saucer. A trail of rumors regarding the high security detail guarding a hangar on the Roswell air base where the balloon/saucer was taken has trailed this story ever since – not to mention why the Army authorized the initial report.

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When I worked in Ruidoso during the early 1990s I met a seemingly rational, intelligent woman who related a tale that when she was a young girl her father, a Roswell firefighter, brought home a piece of metallic foil from the crash site. She and her siblings played with it because it could be folded, crushed or otherwise distorted and it would then unfold itself, returning to a flat sheet of foil. After a few days, an Army detachment arrived at their home and confiscated the piece of foil. Numerous reports of saucer sightings in southern New Mexico during the years immediately following World War II were speculatively linked to the testing of the first atomic bomb at White Sands near Alamogordo. My father, who was completing his engineering degree at New Mexico A&M, now New Mexico State University, in Las Cruces witnessed inexplicable UFOs at the time in the skies near Tularosa.

Whether or not an alien civilization had placed some kind of nuclear early warning system to alert them when human ingenuity produced an atomic explosion seems borderline preposterous. Human histories, however, are replete with reports of “visitors from the skies” which cross all continents, from Peruvian petroglyphs to the Nazca lines only visible from space. And what, for God’s sake, are the Biblical references to fiery chariots in the heavens supposed to tell us? Aliens with sufficient technological prowess to speed across galaxies could surely detect our fumbling with radio transmissions and related signs of intelligent life. The recent report from the Air Force’s Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) committee delivered to Congress has redirected our attention to an acknowledged presence of unexplained, mobile aerial objects.

However, as Ross Douthat recently observed in his New York Times column, the possibility of hangars in the Nevada desert concealing a half-dozen crashed UFOs implies “…inhuman species cross oceans of space or leap interdimensional barriers using unfathomable technology and yet somehow keep crashing and leaving souvenirs behind.” If an alien species can defy the physical constrictions of traveling faster than the speed of light, either utilizing a form of gravity propulsion as proposed by Carl Sagan or the Star Trek equivalent of warp drive, or even weirder yet, slip in and out of our universe from one of dozens or perhaps thousands of parallel universes hidden alongside our own as suggested by string theory, we still have a lot to learn about the cosmos. And if visiting aliens comprehend all this, why are they so frequently colliding with planet Earth?

Setting aside such good reasons for skepticism, it’s plausible an advanced civilization may have adopted something like Star Trek’s Prime Directive – prohibiting interference in our sovereign right to develop naturally. This would account for their apparent reticence to communicate or reveal themselves. If our government is, on the other hand, hiding evidence they possess; they may harbor similar reservations. Yet, it seems evident the Air Force is acknowledging there is something “out there” we don’t understand. We should probably ignore the alleged Pope Pius and Mussolini conspiracy.

Speaking for myself, I’d appreciate it if aliens dismissed their scruples. There’s little question humanity faces a basketful of problems threatening its continued existence which we seem unable to resolve. Resource management, climate change, war in Ukraine and more would benefit from judicious counsel. If observers are surveilling a global clipping service and prefer to evade our global challenges, we have much to remedy here in Colorado. Hooper is sufficiently isolated, so we could meet at the Watchtower for a discreet consultation. Just send us a signal.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.