The object was zipping across the open San Luis Valley. It was cigar-shaped and bronze. And, according to Judy Messoline, more than a dozen saw it, standing at the UFO watch tower just outside of Hooper. Large, hovering low to the ground and moving rapidly, it was an aerial phenomenon they could not identify.
Messoline describes her UFO sightings — like this one from 2000 — in the blunt manner of a Colorado rancher. When she built her watchtower 25 years ago, she was not fueled by alien fascination or conspiracy theories; she wanted to earn some extra cash from tourists. That was it.
“It was a joke,” Messoline said. “That’s what it was, initially, a joke.”
Now at 80 years old, Messoline still jokes often and laughs easily. When she and her partner Stan Becker moved to a patch of land north of Alamosa in the mid-90s, she heard the stories. There was old Native American folklore about Ant People rising out of the Great Sand Dunes. The valley was famous for its tales of unexplained livestock mutilations.
“I’d just giggle and say we need a UFO watchtower, never ever thinking it would happen,” she said. But, after she and Stan began to struggle with their 75-head cattle herd on the high desert landscape, the idea came back around. “They don’t eat sand real well,” Messoline said. “About broke us from having to buy the hay for ‘em.”
A neighboring farmer suggested she take her watchtower joke more seriously.
Driving out to the site in her Chevy Silverado, Messoline said about 10,000 people visited the watchtower last summer. A series of green sheet metal aliens point the way. One sign offers discount tickets to the nearby alligator park. She passed the row of campsites and parked next to a squat dome made of tan stone. Steel scaffolding extends from the dome, holding up a fenced-in platform 10 feet off the ground. It’s perhaps a bit short by watchtower standards, though it still provides fairly unobstructed views of the surrounding valley.
“You don’t hear of many businesses that have made it 25 years. And now, it’s getting more serious because people want to know more,” she said.
In April of 2020, the Pentagon officially declassified three videos. The grainy, black and white footage captured by US Navy pilots appeared to show oblong, pill-shaped objects smoothly flying and rotating in ways thought impossible with modern Earth-bound technologies. The Defense Department has not claimed these sightings were extraterrestrial, but they remain unexplained.
“They weren’t laughing at it anymore,” Messoline said of watchtower visitors after the release of the videos, which were originally leaked to the New York Times two years prior. The stone dome at the attraction is largely a gift shop, full of typical little green man merchandise—socks, oversized alien-eye sunglasses, even Judy’s book about the watchtower’s history. There’s also a three-ring binder thick with handwritten accounts of the UFO sightings there — 304 to be exact.
One tells the tale of an orb which “floated through the sky in a very unnatural fashion.” It joined others, moving across the night sky like a constellation of lights. “It looked as if they were scouting or doing some sort of ‘drill,’” according to the entry.
An adjoining structure built off the back of the dome hosts Messoline’s prized collection of artifacts. There are old newspaper articles, photographs and, most famously, the complete skeleton of Snippy the horse, whose bizarrely butchered body generated international interest when it was found in 1967. Messoline added the skeleton to her collection in 2021.
And luckily for her, Messoline was informed by psychics that the front of her watchtower site contains two metaphysical vortexes watched over by paranormal beings. The vortexes are full of energy, she said, and are marked by a sprawling rock garden.
“I started telling people — and I don't know if it was a good idea or not — but I told them to leave something in the garden and get their energy there as well,” she said. “I finally had to have a gal come last summer and clean it up. We had so much stuff.”
Even post-overhaul, the rock garden is littered with trinkets left in the hopes of a good luck blessing from the beings. It’s all part of the culture at this attraction, which Yelp reviewers have described as “fun, kooky, eclectic,” “kitsch at its finest,” and “a little underwhelming.”
Whatever it is, the UFO Watchtower has been Messoline and Becker’s primary source of income for two decades. It’s enough to get by, supplemented by their Social Security payments. Judy is handing management of the attraction over to her son this year, though she still plans to work the weekends, telling stories of sightings from behind her gift shop counter.
“You’ve got to entertain,” she said. “That’s the whole thing.”
The UFO Watchtower is planning a 25th Anniversary Celebration for Memorial Day weekend, May 24-26. Admission is free along with food, drink and “entertainment.” Messoline did not define the scope of the entertainment, nor its planetary origin. Might be as good a time as any for first contact.
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