Another Roadside Distraction

The tower was built in 1926 in Genoa, a town ninety miles east of Denver along what's now I-70, by Charles Gregory, who was known as the "P.T. Barnum of Colorado." (Never mind that Barnum himself had lived here decades earlier.) In addition to the highest point in 2,000 miles, he also constructed a dozen other rooms and created a popular dancehall/restaurant/roadside destination. "It was a really busy place back then," Chubbuck says.

Chubbuck, who was born in nearby Arriba, bought the complex in 1967, when his farming and ranching business took a turn for the worse. He added more rooms to hold the arrowheads he'd been collecting since he was a kid, and turned the entire place into a huge gift shop and repository of rare goods. His million-piece collection of artifacts, bottles, books, paintings, puzzles, old tools, rocks, picture frames, bullets, bowls and figurines stretches across 22 rooms, including five rooms in the tower. "If it ain't here...it don't exist," promises Wonder View's brochure -- and the place delivers.

Pointing to a 165-pound piece of purple quartz, Chubbuck says, "I'll give it to you if you can put it in your pocket." He doesn't make the same offer with the Civil War buttons -- "the kind they used in Dances With Wolves," the two-headed calf, the white rattlesnake or the one-eyed pig preserved in formaldehyde.

"I need to get more formaldehyde," he says, "but they won't sell it to me, because people use it in meth labs."

UFO Watchtower

Wonder View Tower may once have been the highest point east of Denver, but Judy Messoline has set her sights a lot higher.

After moving from Golden to the San Luis Valley ten years ago to raise cattle, Messoline learned of the area's high concentration of UFO activity. "I always watched The X-Files, but before this I knew nothing about it," she says. And since she didn't have much success raising cattle, in May 2000 she built the UFO Watchtower outside of Hooper. Since then, there have been 31 UFO sightings in the area -- and Messoline's been in on twenty of them.

In one instance, witnesses claim to have seen two lights moving quickly until the one in front stopped to allow the second to catch up, and then they shot across the sky together. In another, a couple said they'd spotted some sort of aircraft go right into a nearby mountain. "I can't tell you if they're little green men, but it is bizarre," Messoline says.

The tower consists of a ten-foot-high metal observation deck above a geodesic dome that serves as a gift shop, stocked with alien paraphernalia and books including Messoline's own work, That Crazy Lady Down the Road. The facility also includes a camping area for people who come to spot UFOs, and a rock garden that Messoline says many people consider to be a healing place, where they can meditate about problems in their lives.

When a pair of tourists look disbelieving, Messoline encourages them to walk through the garden and feel its energy. Their skepticism may be directed more at the two vortexes, or doors to parallel universes, that she says are also in the garden. Messoline discovered the vortexes when a man shone his high-powered flashlight into the sky above and light spiraled over two specific spots. Since that night, more than twenty psychics or particularly intuitive people have identified the vortexes, she says. The psychics also confirmed that two large beings protect the entrances.

"There have been phenomenal results from people just going in and asking for help," Messoline says. "I don't care if it's aliens, angels or God himself. If it helps people, it's good."

Tourists and psychics aren't the only ones who visit. "A lot of times people will come to talk about their abduction experience or UFO experience, or being an extraterrestrial," she says. "They just don't want people to make fun of them. I ask them why they're here, and they say they're here to help people get to the next dimension." While it might be easy to dismiss their claims, Messoline points out that it's harder to ignore the fact that some people who say they're ETs look so similar that they could be twins.

"Sometimes I'll lie awake at night just trying to figure this out," she adds. "You see this stuff, and there has to be an explanation. So far, nobody's been able to come up with one, but it's been fun."