Things Are Looking Up in Colorado: Is It Aliens? UFOs? Balloon Boy?

July 2 is World UFO Day, a time to celebrate Colorado's status as one of the top ten states for spotting an unidentified flying object, with 24.41 sightings per 1 million residents each year.

But really, every day is UFO Day in Colorado, with much-publicized sightings above Red Rocks and renewed interest in the saga of Balloon Boy.

What is it about this state that inspires tales of mysterious objects flying overhead? Is it a simple matter of elevation — we’re nearer to the sky, so we see more things in it? Is it the lack of oxygen, causing some visitors to hallucinate? Is it the fact that Mork & Mindy, starring Robin Williams as an alien, was set in Boulder? And what about the (relatively few) cases in which there’s photographic evidence of…well, something?

Clearly, Colorado wants to believe. While the state may not be racking up numbers like Area 51 and Roswell, we have our stories of close encounters, many of them captured in a 1969 report from the University of Colorado.

Here are ten of the most memorable:
Pikes Peak, 1947
Just over a month before the incident at Roswell, New Mexico, started a spike in UFO sightings across the nation, there was a sighting right here in Manitou Springs on May 19, 1947. Seven employees of the Pikes Peak Railway were breaking for lunch when they spotted a shining silver object coming at them from the northeast. It would stop in mid-air, gyrate a bit, then fly in a deliberate straight line, all the time reflecting light in the way metal might. They tried to look at it through binoculars, but somehow those seemed to bring the image no closer. After twenty minutes of this aerial show, the object sped off to the west. The United States Air Force investigated, and reported that the phenomenon was “possible birds,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

La Veta, 1955
In late November 1955, State Senator Sam T. Taylor saw what he described as a "dirigible-shaped object" at the base of the Spanish Peaks in Huerfano County — the very part of the state he represented. Taylor, who was the Democratic floor leader at the time, described it as a "luminous green-blue and jellylike" object that changed flight paths in mid-air. This is only one of the many stories revealed in the declassification of Project Blue Book, which tracked UFO data from 1952 until 1969.
San Luis Valley, 1967
A three-year-old Appaloosa named Lady disappeared from the Harry King Ranch one day; she was found a couple of days later, dead and skinned around the head and neck, with several vital organs seemingly removed with surgical precision. The horse became a Colorado legend, nicknamed “Snippy” courtesy of the gallows humor of journalists referencing the condition of her remains, which were completely drained of blood; her naked skull was bleached as though it had been baking in the high desert sun for years. “Flying Saucer Sought in Death of Horse” was the headline of an October 6, 1967, article in the Rocky Mountain News.

Genesee, 1973
Woody Allen was apparently persuaded that Colorado was the perfect spot to see the future, and filmed sci-fi comedy Sleeper here. One of the sets included the "Sculptured House" built by architect Charles Deaton in 1963; it soon was nicknamed "Spaceship House" and then "Sleeper House." "On Genesee Mountain I found a high point of land where I could stand and feel the great reaches of the Earth," Deaton is quoted as saying in the 2009 book The Iconic House. "I wanted the shape of it to sing an unencumbered song." What's perhaps even more surprising is that this purple prose — and the unique home design still visible off I-70 that it inspired — came before marijuana was legalized in 2012.
Salida, 1995
Tim Edwards of Salida captured what many consider to be some of the best UFO footage to come from our state. When a tube-shaped object appeared in the sky near his Chaffee County home, the local restaurateur grabbed his camcorder and began to record. "I don't look outside no more," he told the Gazette Telegraph in 1996. "I don't get no sleep."
Loveland, 2000-2014
For more than a decade, Colorado resident Stan Romanek was a leading expert in UFO lore, claiming to have been abducted first in 2000 and then several more times in subsequent years. He's also the person responsible for the widely circulated and highly suspect "boo video" of an alien supposedly peeking through one of his windows. The scariest part of Romanek's tale turned out to be something other than his abduction stories, however: He was convicted for possession of child pornography in 2017 and served two years in prison. He's currently a registered sex offender under intensive supervised probation through 2030, which means even the aliens don't want to have anything to do with the guy anymore.

Breckenridge, 2014
Three faint, ball-shaped orbs appeared over Breckenridge on October 3, 2014; employees of both the Breckenridge Police Department and the Summit County Sheriff’s Office were among the witnesses. "We have no idea what that was, no clue," local law enforcement told the Summit Daily. Still, according to the paper of record, neither department had plans to launch an investigation into what might have been behind the unidentified visitors to the mountain-town skyline "unless investigating means they walked outside on Friday to look at the sky."

La Junta, 2019
In a YouTube video that hit big, a security cam in someone's driveway captured this image in the middle of the night. People described it as everything from Dobby from Harry Potter (like that's more believable than alien visitation?) to just a skinny kid in his underwear...doing a weird chicken dance in the wee hours of the morning.

Northeast Colorado, 2019-20
At the start of the COVID pandemic, there was a lot to focus on in the news...so you'd be forgiven if you've totally forgotten the invasion of drone-like lights over northeast Colorado and southwest Nebraska around the holidays, right before everything closed down. They always appeared after sunset, thirty-some six-foot-wide objects in formation, 200 to 300 feet above the ground. And then we all forgot about them because we were sheltering in place. Coincidence? Yes, obviously. This isn't InfoWars.

Red Rocks, June 2024
A "large, disc-shaped craft with three levels of windows" was spotted by twelve Red Rocks workers loading out after a concert,"north of Red Rocks about a mile or so, hovering above the treetops on the [Hogback's] ridge," according to a report posted by the National UFO Reporting Center on June 11, 2024. "I was working at Red Rocks Amphitheater last night when one of our coworkers suddenly said to us, 'Hey, what is that over there? It looks like a spaceship,'" a Red Rocks employee wrote in the report. "We all turned to look in the direction he was pointing and sure enough, there was a UFO hovering about a half-a-mile to a mile north of Red Rocks. A dozen of us saw it. We all kept asking each other, 'Are you seeing this too?' It was a resounding 'yes' from everyone in the group."

"It's Red Rocks. We see magical, mysterious and wondrous things every night," explained venue spokesman Brian Kitts. "And we wouldn't be at all surprised if Red Rocks' reputation is intergalactic."


And a bonus:

The UFO WatchTower, ongoing
If Colorado has a Roswell analog, it's the town of Hooper, population 77, which has lost about a quarter of its residents in the last fifteen years — not to abduction (so far as we know), but to simple attrition. Still, it boasts the 25-year-old UFO WatchTower a couple of miles north on Highway 17, where owner and operator Judy Messoline invites stargazers, skywatchers, campers and tourists of all kinds, alien or human, to visit. The observation platform has a 360-degree view of the surrounding area, with a gift shop, vortex garden and a small memorial to none other than Snippy the Horse, whose bones are here on display. As Messoline's UFO Watchtower website proclaims: “You never know who you will run into at the UFO WatchTower for a little conversation!!”

This story has been updated from the original version published on February 16, 2023.