From a murdered horse to unexplained phenomena caught on videotape, these UFO sightings in Colorado have people shaking their heads to this day.
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a…hmm, what is that exactly? When an aerial sighting leaves you dumbfounded, you may have just seen an unidentified flying object, or UFO for short. These include any object in the air or optical phenomenon that a human observer or machine sensor can’t identify or explain.
In more recent years, scientific bodies and government organizations have given UFOs a bit of a rebrand to try and move away from the “flying saucer” craze that began around the middle of the 20th century. The name was first changed to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and later to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
Whatever you call them, the Centennial State has had plenty of unique encounters. Here are nine of the strangest UFO sightings in Colorado history.
1. Pikes Peak sighting (1947)
Pikes Peak is one of the most popular destinations for Colorado visitors, but one afternoon in 1947, it had an unexplained visitor. Pikes Peak Railway employees were on their lunch break when, suddenly, a silver object emerged from the sky. The employees initially thought it might be a plane, but they quickly realized it wasn’t behaving like a conventional aircraft.
In Project Blue Book, a collection of UFO records from over the years, the employees said the object was moving incredibly fast. It would stop, gyrate, and fly in ways unlike that of a typical airplane. Using binoculars seemed to produce no magnifying effect for the metallic object. The craft hung around the area for several minutes, then vanished into the distance.
2. La Veta (1955)
Sam T. Taylor is the longest-serving legislator in Colorado’s history, serving from 1934 to 1974. As you might expect over a 40-year career (and for someone who was born in what’s now a ghost town), Taylor saw a few unexplainable things. One of those occurred on Nov. 25, 1955, when Taylor watched a “dirigible-shaped object” performing unusual maneuvers in the sky.
Taylor was the Democratic floor leader when he saw this “luminous green-blue and jellylike” object effortlessly changing flight paths in mid-air. The object flew over La Veta, in Huerfano County, at the base of the Spanish Peaks. That happens to be the same area Taylor represented. Was he capitalizing on a recent UFO craze from the past decade to get re-elected? Perhaps, but what he may have seen has never been uncovered.
3. Boulder County skeptics (1966)
UFOlogists and extraterrestrial enthusiasts often face criticism from doubters who try to poke holes in their various experiences, or explain them in some other way. So, when an event turns a skeptic into a believer, it’s a riveting feeling. Commissioned by the U.S. Air Force in 1966, the University of Colorado Boulder conducted investigations into nearly 20 years of reported UFO sightings in Colorado.
The report includes some of these stories. In 1947, on the same day as the “Roswell Incident” with a flying disc, a woman named Ernestine Pettengill was walking with a friend when they encountered one of these UAPs. Pettengill said it was “blue in the center and white around the edge. It was round, flat, and quite bright.” She continued, “I had been very skeptical of the talk about flying discs until I saw one myself.”
The report also references a 1960 sighting by a man named Ray Hawks. He was driving his tractor in Left Hand Canyon and saw a flying saucer hovering in front of him for about a quarter of an hour. The saucer made an “off-beat humming noise and exuded a kind of bluish smoke. Suddenly, Hawks was sitting on a tractor that was no longer functioning. “I thought the reports of these strange aircraft were a lot of hogwash,” he said. “I know better now. I was really shaken by this experience.”
4. “Snippy” the Horse (1967)
Lady, better known as “Snippy,” was a three-year-old Appaloosa mare who lived at the Harry King Ranch in Alamosa. Typically, Snippy would return to the barn nightly for a bedtime drink. However, on Sept. 7, she was nowhere to be found, so the ranchers started a search. On Sept. 9, Harry King found Snippy about a quarter mile from the ranch. She had been mutilated and skinned. Yet no blood or footprints were found around the horse.
There were claims of quite a few eerie occurrences around Snippy’s death, too. Agnes King, the ranch’s mother, said she saw something flying in the sky the day Snippy disappeared, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Others said Snippy’s bones appeared bright pink. Linda Moulton Howe, an investigative journalist and documentarian, won an Emmy for her 1980 documentary, “A Strange Harvest.” The film (pardon the pun) dissects mysterious animal mutilation stories, including Snippy’s. Today, you can visit Snippy’s remains at the UFO Watchtower in the San Luis Valley. The “paranormal Disneyland” feels like a fitting home for the horse.
5. Salida backyard video (1995)
In 1995, Tim Edwards’s six-year-old daughter was playing in the family’s backyard. She saw something in the sky and brought her father outside. He quickly grabbed a video camera and documented about seven minutes of footage of a tube-like object floating in the sky, almost like a hovering cigar.
“Ain’t no kind of aircraft, I’ll tell you that,” Edwards says in the video alongside mesmerized gasps from his daughter. The object appears to get longer before retracting and growing again. Flashes of light dart across the surface of the UFO. There’s also something that looks like a ball, fluttering around whatever it is in the sky. Over 30 years later, it’s still a common topic among UFOlogists. On the show “Chasing UFOs” from National Geographic, experts say Edwards’s video is “one of the most compelling” cases for a UFO they’ve ever seen.
6. UFOs over Breckenridge (2014)
“We have no idea what that was, no clue.” When the sheriff’s office has a response like that, you know you’re cooking with something exciting. “They looked white or shiny only because the sun was in that area,” continued Taneil Ilano, spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office. “They were there for a little while, and then they were gone.”
The National UFO Reporting Center’s website said they believed the objects, which appeared shortly after noon on Friday, Oct. 3, were “high-altitude, helium-filled balloons, launched for scientific purposes.” Other witnesses claimed to see military aircraft approaching the objects, perhaps to try and communicate with them. We may never know what this UFO actually is, but that’s one way to spice up a lunch break.
7. The La Junta Alien (2019)
The increase in home security systems has naturally led to more sightings of unexplained events. Cameras can sometimes spot action in the sky, though they’re often focused on the ground right in front of them. And this home security video from a house in La Junta is less UFO/UAP and more UWSCV, or Unidentified Weird Security Camera Video, a scientific term we totally didn’t just make up right now.
With over 13 million views, people have theories about the “something” caught on camera. Paranormal enthusiasts think they’re seeing a ghost or an alien strolling the driveway. Some believe it looks like Dobby from the “Harry Potter” franchise (though it’s unclear if it possesses a sock). Others think it might just be a bored neighborhood kid doing a funky, “Monty Python”-esque walk while wearing underwear on his head.
Take a look and decide for yourself. Perhaps you’d agree with one YouTube commenter, who wrote, “If I saw this on my security camera I’d have a For Sale sign on my front lawn the next morning.”
8. Colorado and Nebraska drones (2019-2020)
Bright, festive lights are no shock around the holidays, but northeastern Colorado and western Nebraska residents got more than just a neighborhood Christmas lights show during the winter of 2019 and beginning of 2020. Witnesses reported mysterious drones with a six-foot wingspan and blinking lights flying across the skies.
The drones hovered between 200 and 500 feet, flew in formations of six to ten, and were most frequently spotted in the mid-to-late evening. What makes the sightings most perplexing is that no one ever claimed to be operating the vehicles. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reached out to nearby drone companies and unmanned aircraft test sites, but they came up empty.
Over 70 federal, state, and local agencies—including the FBI, U.S. Air Force, and FAA—met in early January 2020 to determine the source of the sightings. The Colorado Department of Public Safety wrapped up active investigations around the end of January 2020. Little did they know that their focus would soon turn to the COVID-19 pandemic. While they claimed the majority of sightings were either hobbyist drones, commercial aircraft, or a mix of planets and stars, all of the objects have still never been definitively identified.
9. Red Rocks UFO (2024)
UFO sightings in Colorado are plentiful, but the freaky factor of any UFO or UAP story increases based on how many people witnessed it. One person claiming to see something is interesting, but a dozen people all reporting the same experience? That feels especially extraterrestrial.
On June 5, 2024, 12 employees of Red Rocks Amphitheatre spotted a “large, disc-shaped craft with three levels of windows” hovering above the treetops on Hogback’s Ridge, about a mile north of the amphitheatre. The employees filed a report with the National UFO Reporting Center, claiming whatever they saw was “totally silent.” As the employees paid attention, it seemed to react. The report noted it “tipped at an angle and slowly started moving belly-first to the east” before fading away and turning invisible. “It simply dissolved into the ether,” the report said.
Understandably, the employees wanted to make sure they weren’t the only ones watching this unfold. They kept checking in with each other to see if they were seeing what was going on too, and “it was a resounding ‘yes’ from everyone in the group.” Next time you think a show at Red Rocks starts too late, remember you might also encounter a UFO. That’s worth staying up for.
