When Christopher O’Brien made the fateful decision to move to the Crestone-Baca section of the San Luis Valley in Colorado seven years ago, little did he realize he was stepping into a kind of "Twilight Zone" where paranormal activities of all kinds happen almost constantly. UFO sightings, Unusual Animal Deaths (O’Brien’s preferred term for cattle mutilations), and a secretive military presence are a nearly daily part of the landscape in the remote section of the Southwest O’Brien writes about in his book The Mysterious Valley (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). The book chronicles both his research into the experiences of numerous local residents as well as his own personal experiences with anomalous lights and strange bedroom visitors.

We spoke to O’Brien by phone from his home in "The Mysterious Valley," and he talked about not only what is happening there in the San Luis Valley, but also shared his own theories as to why it is happening.

Q. Can you give us a brief account of how you came to live in the San Luis Valley and then began your research there?

O’Brien: Well, I’d known about the San Luis Valley because of the "Snippy the Horse" case back in ’67. I grew up in Washington State and right out of high school in ’75 I moved to New York City where I lived for 12 years. And then I spent two years in Boston. It’s really pretty simple. I was out on a fossil hunting trip in Utah. I drove out from Boston. And on the way back, I had a couple of friends who had just bought a lot here and they suggested that I stop by and visit. Which I did. I spent a day here and really liked it but I felt the area was a little bit remote for me having come from a big city. And three months later, I decided to move out to Santa Fe, and immediately didn’t like my choice. And after three days of being there, I moved out here. And here I am, seven years later.

Q. Okay, so that explains your move. How did you begin your research?

O’Brien: Well, like I said, I did have a little bit of knowledge about the history of the area, you know, past activity. But I figured pretty much it had all ended and it was all things from the past. I had a New Years Eve party on December 31, 1992 and I was kind of surprised to hear people talking about UFO sightings they’d had. And a couple or three different groups of people in the house were talking about them. So, I interviewed them all separately and brought them together. And some of them didn’t know that others had shared their experience. Then I asked them if they’d ever seen these lights before, and one of them said "The night before Thanksgiving," and another friend of mine said, "That’s when they discovered a mutilated cow down in Costilla County." Ever since then, I’ve been devoting as much time as possible to chasing down reports of this kind.

Q. So, you conducted hundreds of interviews and then attempted to verify all the accounts you heard. Can you tell us about some of the more significant events you document in the book?

O’Brien: Well, the NORAD phone call to the Rio Grande County Sheriff is probably the one that stands head and shoulders above the rest. Since it’s very, very rare for our Space Command, operators at Buckley and NORAD to call a local sheriff and report something as unusual as a few-acre size fire, and then to have the corroborating witnesses to a large formation of objects that flew into the Valley that day--I find that to be the most intriguing case that I personally have investigated. But again there have been some others. The unusual calf death over in Del Norte in the first week of March ’94 was also a very riveting case. That’s the one animal death that literally gave me the creeps and kind of made my hair stand on end. Those two sort of spring to mind. Obviously, my own sightings, because I personally experienced them, they also kind of impressed me. But it’s real difficult, other than those three examples, it’s real difficult to differentiate between all the dozens and dozens of other cases and reports that I’ve investigated. They’re all equally riveting in their own right, and they all I think have relevance. Especially the multiple-witness events where obviously you have a group of people. It’s very interesting to see how large groups of people respond to something unusual. And those particular sightings do stand head and shoulders above a lot of the others because of the amount of people involved.

Q. So, there’s obviously an endless flow of UFO sightings, Unusual Animal Deaths and helicopter sightings going on there in the San Luis Valley.

O’Brien: Well, it ebbs and flows. There’s no real rhyme or reason for the timing. When things are poppin’ around here, it does get pretty intense. I get numerous calls in a week. And then I can go months without one or with just one or two. If this stuff was all misidentified scavenger action or misidentified planets or whatever, you’d think you’d always have a trickle of reports. It would never really end. You’d always have something coming in. And that’s not the case. We can go weeks without a single call or report. And that to me kind of gives the indication that "Hey, maybe there’s something to this." Because when things are poppin’ around here, it’s amazing how many sightings and witnesses come out of the woodwork. And you’d think that there would be at least a constant trickle of reports if this was all just chalked up to people misidentifying things.

Q. I know you say there are many theories as to why these events are happening. Can you give us an overview of some of these explanations? As well as what you personally feel is the most likely cause of these events?

O’Brien: Well, in this country especially, there tends to be a real leaning towards the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. Based on a lot of the work that’s been done by people like Linda Moulton-Howe and others, there does seem to be a body of evidence that supports the conclusion that we are being visited by non-human entities from off-planet. You don’t see this particular hypothesis, however, being as popular in other parts of the world, like South America and Europe and Asia. There tends to be a whole kind of drifting away from that and more skepticism for that hypothesis when you get out of this country. For instance, the animal deaths. There’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest that the military’s involved. We have well over 250 documented cases of military-style helicopters buzzing around mutilation sights either before, during, or after. The sightings during one of these experiments are pretty rare. However, there’s quite a number of reports of helicopters especially afterwards, checking particular sites or areas out. And that would be an indication to me that if it’s not the military, then they sure have an interest in it.

There’s all kinds of theories as to why these cows are being taken in this manner and being cut up. David Perkins in the late 70s came up with the conclusion that a lot of these areas of high incidence are downwind and downstream of places where uranium is utilized. Whether it’s a uranium mine or an enrichment lab or a nuclear power plant or even missile silo areas. And he concluded that perhaps we’re seeing some kind of "environmental monitoring" going on where soft-tissue areas of cows are being taken and analzyed for environmental pollutants. Using that sort of theory, I’ve often wondered if the San Luis Valley, which is one of the most pristine areas in the continental United States, whether the cows here could be considered some kind of "control group."

Now, who’s doing these experiments? Who’s flying these ships? I have a hunch that quite a number of these aerial lights and craft that are reported here could actually be very terrestrial, very military and very secret. There’s a couple of theories that I’ve heard that when they moved a lot of the more esoteric equipment out of Area 51 in the mid- to late-80s, that some of them moved here. And it’s very difficult to imagine our government having the technology to fly a mile-long ship. You know, a rectangular or triangular ship in the sky at very slow airspeed. But, who knows? If it’s not our government, then who the heck is it? There are other theories, too, that maybe this is some sort of "manifested psychism" from the collective unconscious. Maybe we as a culture are actually "creating" paranormal phenomena for some particular reason that’s unknown. A lot of these things have been reported for thousands of years. You know, "chariots of fire" and "wheels within wheels" and "flaming wheels in the sky" and gnomes and fairies and goblins and trolls and all these kinds of descriptions of the unknown that have been with us for hundreds of thousands of years. And yet how do we know that UFOs and unusual cattle deaths are nothing more than an extension into time to a high-tech aspect of these manifestations that we may as a culture or a species be responsible for. I mean, it could be travelers from time coming back to harvest cattle parts and then go back in time. We could be dealing with entities from the inner earth. John Keel came up with the idea of the "ultra-terrestrial," some sort of dimensional-type being that shares our space with us but on a different plane of existence or different level of existence. There’s so many theories, and there’s a lot of evidence to back each one of them up. However, there’s just as much if not more evidence to negate that particular theory, whatever it might be. So, I really think we need to broaden our approach as interested investigators and researchers into this realm. We need to broaden our approach and to look at things that peripherally have not been really scrutinized before by Ufologists or phenomenologists. In my book, I really do try to get into the Native American myths and traditions and get into the geology of the area. To look at every single aspect of the area and don’t discard anything. Collect all the information and take the San Luis Valley as a microcosm of the macro. And the hermetic axiom "As above, so below" should come into play. If I can figure some things out on the microcosmic level here in the San Luis Valley, it should overlay onto the macrocosm of the entire "big picture." And a lot of people are coming up with theories and running around collecting data to try to prove these theories and I’m not sure if that’s the most effective way that we can try to solve these last remaining mysteries.

Q. Very good. Well, some of the witnesses describe the helicopters as being as silent as alien ships. Does this somehow imply that the helicopter phenomenon might be an alien thing and not a human/military thing?

O’Brien: Well, again, I think it’s so multifarious and there’s so many different players involved here. There’s different agendas at work. I really feel that there is a possibility that helicopter images could somehow be used as a screen image or some sort of camouflage for something more high-tech and more strange. I’ve seen very interesting footage that Jose Escamillo and his family took near Midway in New Mexico of a helicopter flying along and then morphing right into a silver sphere or disk. And it would seem to me that if we are dealing with some sort of intelligent, non-human species of some kind--like, why do they light their ships up to begin with? Why do we see anomalous lights in the sky? They don’t need lights. They literally could travel with no running lights at all. And the fact that they do use lights means that at times they want to be seen. I think appearances are deceiving and, who knows? Maybe all these blinking red and white lights that fly over here--how do I know it’s an airliner unless I hear it? And the same goes with the helicopters. I had a postmaster go outside. His whole house was shaking. He went outside and just a few feet above him was a huge helicopter. Be he heard absolutely no motor sound. All he heard was the sound of the rotors whipping through the air in the down blast of the wind. That’s the only sound he heard. The thing took off, and it was mechanically silent although the rotors were making noise in the air. This guy is ex-military and a trained observer and you’d think that he would be able to differentiate between something normal and something "high strange" like that.

So, it’s really difficult to answer the question because the answer might hold true for one side of the question, whereas on the other side, it wouldn’t be true. So, who knows? I think a lot of these choppers are military. We have a low flight level Military Operations Area (MOA) here called the LeVido MOA and almost daily we see fighter planes and transport planes and helicopters flying around here. However, how do we know that some high-tech presence isn’t flying something alongside these conventional craft that looks conventional but in actuality isn’t? It’s very, very difficult. The more I get involved in this stuff, the more confusing it seems. And the less you really know. The less you can be sure of.

Q. In the section of the book where you discuss the links between Tibetan monks and Hopi Indians, you write "Some Hope elders predict that the U.S. will go to war abroad in the summer of 1996." What is your reaction to the fulfillment of that prophecy by our firing of missiles on Iraq?

O’Brien: Well, I’m not surprised. The Hopi, and Native Americans in general, for some reason I get a gut sense, my instinct tells me that they are somehow privy to prophecy-type information. I just get a sense that Native Americans, for some reason, do have some information that they’re not generally allowing to go out beyond their own subculture. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that Martin and Thomas’ vision of this summer is coming true. The troops in Bosnia, they’re sitting on a powder keg. The whole Middle East is just waiting for the wrong thing to happen at the right time. I think it was a pretty safe bet that any sort of prophecy like that would come true. (Laughter) But I think it is an indication that Native Americans are concerned about our planet and about other people on this planet. And that they are slowly opening up and trying to convey this concern to the world at large. And again I’m not surprised at all that it came true.

Q. Well, do you personally believe in prophecy, like Biblical prophecy or Nostradamus?

O’Brien: You know, that’s a good question. I think there’s got to be some sort of grain of truth to the idea of prophecy. Whether Nostradamus is correct versus Michael Scallion versus one of the little girls at Lourdes or Fatima, it’s real difficult to say. There’s a lot of people out there professing to be prophesying, and none of these prophecies have come true. I think part of the reason why prophecy exists in our culture is pretty simple. It’s to warn us about what it looks like we’re going towards and maybe try to change people just enough so that these prophecies don’t come true. I think prophecies are as much a warning as they are "reality-based information." I think it’s a lot of instinctual stuff. I don’t think it’s the voice of God speaking through a particular person. Maybe it was a few thousand years ago or something. I don’t know. But now I think it’s just people really "grokking" the flow of where things are going. Scallion is a good example of somebody who really has a handle on an aspect of our planet. He really does put a lot of emphasis on the earthquakes and the natural calamities that we see routinely on this planet. But I really do think there is something to prophecy but not to the extent that someone maybe a little more Fundamentalist would think.

Q. Well, having been witness to a lot of gory scenes involving mutilated cattle, do you still believe it’s possible that the aliens are a benevolent force with the good of mankind as part of their agenda? Can the cattle mutilation phenomenon have a basically good motivation behind it?

O’Brien: Well, that’s like asking me if someone who experiences stigmata, if that’s a positive or negative thing in their life. To give you an example, Padre Pelo, a very, very famous "near saint," if you will in the Christian Catholic religion, would manifest the wounds of the nails and the spear thrust into the side of the crucified Christ. Now, I would think that something like that would not necessarily be a positive thing. I mean, it would have to hurt, I would think, and be quite uncomfortable. But it’s attributed by the culture and the people who believe in the tradition, it’s considered a blessing, almost. The guy has to be in a state of grace in order to be holy enough or pious enough to exhibit these very flagrant paranormal wounds. So, it’s really difficult to be judgmental in this realm. I don’t think it’s positive and I don’t think it’s negative. I think we’re seeing a very methodical process that has some sort of experimentation going on. Maybe it’s being done to fight some major virus that we experience as a society in the future. It’s time travelers coming back and harvesting parts to try to save us in the future. If it’s that, it would be a very positive thing. If it’s nasty reptoids coming from some other galaxy harvesting parts to feed themselves or do weird genetic experiments that we don’t stand to gain from, then that would be a negative thing. There’s evidence to support either contention. I really try to keep my judgmental side out of it and not pass judgment on it saying that it’s one thing or another thing. There are other researchers and investigators out there who are convinced that this is a very negative thing and they do cite a body of evidence to support that. However, we don’t know. We really don’t know. We don’t have enough information to ascertain--I mean, obviously it’s pretty negative for the poor cow and for the rancher who’s out the money. But the agenda behind it, we don’t have enough information to even decide whether it’s benevolent or malevolent. And I don’t go out on a limb and say it’s one or the other. It’s very perplexing and it’s very mysterious. It does have a veneer of being malevolent, because it is probably one of the only "blood-based" phenomena that we have out here. "Blood-based" paranormal phenomena. A real cattle mutilation to me is a paranormal event.

However, just because it’s "blood-based" doesn’t necessarily mean it’s negative. And I’m not saying that these are all positive entities going around doing positive things to very unfortunate cattle, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m not willing to say it’s the other way either.

Q. Right. You discuss in the book about how the Lord’s Supper is "blood-based."

O’Brien: Well, the body of Christ is offered up in the Catholic mass. And there’s examples of blood in rituals all through the Western esoteric tradition as well as many of the other traditions on the planet. So, blood is something that we do have a tendency to use as some sort of spiritual elixir or element in a ritual. The cattle death phenomenon to me smacks of ritual. There’s something ritualistic about it. And what that is and why it is, I’m probably the last person you should ask.

Q. Okay. Well, your personal experiences with the paranormal began when you were a child. And you also talk about many of your own sightings and even a couple of visitations that happened to you there in the San Luis Valley.

O’Brien: Well, I’m not sure what they were. They could have been visitations. But they sure were weird. I had my little, kind of shadow things back last week for the first time in a year and a half. Which kind of shocked me. I wasn’t prepared for it. It’s not like something I see every day. When whatever it is is here, I know it. And I’m very sensitive to that. However, 99.9 percent of the time, they’re not here. So, I do have something to sort of base my judgment on.

Q. Well, talk about these shadow figures a little more.

O’Brien: Well, it’s difficult for me to really convey. They’re shadow-like, but some rippling energy is bouncing off the shadows. It’s very difficult to describe or to give a real accurate visual idea of what I experience. And it’s only been a handful of times. But I do get a sense of a group of energetic forms that come into the room. I’ve only experienced it when I’ve been in bed with the light off in my bedroom. The closest I’ve come to identifying any sort of shape or form was I could have sworn I saw a shoulder go by at one point. I feel a tingling sensation when they get very close to me. I’ve literally had what I thought was "them" or whatever it is within inches of my face, and my face starts to break out in a tingle. I don’t know if that’s a psychosomatic reaction to my perception or whether it’s a physical manifestation of something. I don’t know. When I was six and a half years old, I had an actual encounter or visitation by four or five of your typical gray little guys. But I can’t remember their eyes. They’re blanked out in my mind. But these entities followed me around in my neighborhood at three in the morning. And I have more than enough evidence from the experience to know that I wasn’t sleep-walking, I wasn’t dreaming, I was not feverish or in some sort of possibly hallucinatory state of any kind. That was a very, shall we say, "riveting" experience for a young kid. It took my sister a while to find me. When a neighbor called and said "Your little boy’s pounding on our door and seems really frightened," it took a bit of time for her to locate me. And I wasn’t where I should have been. I was three houses away. So, something may or may not have occurred. I’ve never actually gone and had any sort of hypno-regression. I guess I’ll save that for the second or third book. (Laughter)

Q. Well, do you ever feel you were "chosen" or predestined to be part of the San Luis Valley events? And to write, lecture, and appear on radio and television as part of a larger plan to help make the reality of the aliens apparent to the general population?

O’Brien: I’ve entertained the thought, and I’ve "what-ifed" to myself more than a few times about that. I choose not to buy into that particular scenario simply because I do exercise my true will and my free will. And if my true and free will is involved in some sort of agenda, I don’t know it consciously. Whether I was "chosen" or predestined, it’s very difficult for me to say. I mean, if you had asked me five years ago what I’d be doing now, the last thing I would have said would be being on television and writing a book about all this stuff. So, a certain aspect of it does kind of make me wonder, let’s put it that way. I mean, I felt compelled to do what I did, but whether that was anything beyond my own personal compulsion, I don’t really know. I can’t really say, because, consciously, it doesn’t appear that way.

Q. Well, the Crestone-Baca area in the San Luis Valley has become a "New Age Mecca" and is also described as a "doorway between dimensions" kind of place. Would you care to discuss that perception of the area and to give us an overview of some of the folklore and myths associated with it? I’m very interested in that aspect, the local folklore.

O’Brien: Oh, so am I. In fact, I think it’s intrinsic to any sort of evaluation or examination of any area. You have to look at the folklore and the historic traditions that exist in the subculture. And what’s interesting about this area is that it does have quite an exalted place in the traditions of many Native Americans. It’s one of the only areas on the whole continent where three major groups of Indians overlapped and shared a particular part of the geography. And this is the site of the most holy mountain in most Southwest Indian tribes’ tradition. It’s the Holy Mountain of the East "where all thought originates." To the Pueblo Indians, and some of the other local tribes, it’s considered "the place of emergence." Obviously, this information varies from tribe to tribe and from major Indian group to major Indian group. But we do have a tradition and an historic sort of indicator that this area is a sacred area. And, of course, when I arrived here, everybody was talking about "portals" and "dimensional doorways" and all these things. Whenever I asked them "How do you know that they’re here?" they’d just say, "Well, that’s what I’ve heard." So, one of my early motivations was to really try to dig into the perception by people here that this is a holy place where there are energetic properties that are unusual. These "doorways" and "portals," obviously, this was very intriguing. Sedona is another area that springs to mind that has a similar reputation. That was one of my driving compulsions--to figure out where did this information originate, why and is there any basis in fact? And as I found out, the area does have some highly unusual gravitational and aero-magnetic areas. And where the two minimum and maximum zones in a particular area, where they intersect tends to be the scene where a lot of our paranormal activities is reported.

So, my gut tells me that there is an inter-relatedness between the historic tradition and the possible geophysical energetic properties. There does seem to be an indication that there’s something to that.

And there are other areas. I’m not saying that we’re the center of the Ufological or paranormal universe here. Not by any stretch of the imagination. There are other areas scattered around the country that are as enigmatic, if not more so, in some cases. But it’s the combination of the unusual, geophysical properties with the tradition of sacredness by indigneous people and, for some reason, military activity. The military tends to grab areas that are around that sacred site or that geophysical energy. We do have the Military Operations Area here. So, whenever I see those three components or elements together in a geographic location, then I automatically assume that there’s weird stuff going on there and sure enough, most of your areas that do report a higher incidence of unusual activity or reports of that nature do tend to have those three elements there, based on my limited research as an amateur.

Q. Is there anything you wish to add? Is there any question I haven’t asked?

O’Brien: Well, it’s not my intention to scare people and it’s not my intention to "prove" to people that I know what I’m talking about or anything of that nature. It’s just looking at a microcosm of the macro and really examining it. You know, it’s a very difficult place to live and I’m really hoping that some of the fears of the locals here aren’t realized and that people flood into the area based on their newfound knowledge of the area. It’s extremely rigorous climate-wise and economically it’s one of the poorest areas in the country. So, you have to be either independently wealthy or really creative. And I’ve been accused by some local media on the front range of just trying to increase the tourist traffic here, which I find pretty funny when I hear that. Because, quite frankly, I’ve put myself out on a little bit of a limb by saying I live in this small little town and writing about it. You know, I have to deal with that, and for the last four years, I’ve had people come from other countries and people chase me down on job sites and gigs. And in the most unlikely situations, all of a sudden something pops up. "Hi, I’m from Missouri. Could you show me?" People expect me to drop everything I’m doing because they’re there. I guess I set myself up a little bit in that regard, but it’s something that I’m dealing with. I think most people do have a sense of respecting a person’s space. So, I’m hoping that I can remain here and continue living here. I’m working on a second book already. It’s going to be almost a continuation of the first book, but I’m going to look at some other mysteries that I didn’t get into in the first book. I’m going to dive a little deeper into the Native American information and into the underground bases that are supposed to be here. And about using hard science to do surveillance on some particular, very small, localized hot spots.

So, I’m having a lot of fun. I’ve gotten some of the historical stuff out of the way, which did kind of bog me down a little bit. I had to get into the "Snippy" case and the cattle mutilation wave in the 70s. And now that I’ve covered all that ground, it gives me a little more leeway and I can go in depth in some of the other more enigmatic things here. The treasure legends. We’ve got Spanish treasure maps and multigenerational families that are looking for lost treasure. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, and I just scratched the surface with the first book.