The UFO Issue

If I have not yet given readers the impression of Mancos being a fairly unusual place, this story should do the trick. I have recounted this tale to pals, but it translates better into text than talk - at a certain point, peoples' eyes glaze over before I get to the best part.

As the editor of the Mancos Times, I was touched in a peripheral way by a piece of American mythology/mystery that enjoys a robust cult following - the Aztec UFO crash, far more interesting than anything that happened at the more famous Roswell site. Google it - you'll see what I mean.

One day, during a relative lull in the news, I was sitting in the newsroom at the Cortez Journal. By now, I had a fairly clean, clear desk. My line rang - I braced myself, never knowing what would happen when I picked up a phone.

A well-spoken man was at the other end. He introduced himself as Scott Ramsey and explained that he was looking for a picture of a former Mancos Baptist minister, Pastor Autrey Brown of the Mancos Baptist Church. Pastor Brown was in Mancos in 1948. I cringed, and saw myself digging through the filthy bound volumes living in the Mancos newspaper office. I needed a good reason to do this, and asked, "Why?"

Mr. Ramsey explained that for several years, he had been investigating an alleged UFO crash. The crash site was thought to be near Aztec, New Mexico, about an hour south of Durango. Highway 550 runs through Aztec, and runs north to Durango. Aztec is about an hour and a half from Mancos.

According to Mr. Ramsey, on March 25, 1948, at around 5 a.m., a group of workers from the El Paso Oil company were called out to Hart Canyon Road, northeast of Aztec, N.M., to respond to a brush fire near some storage tanks.


Ramsey said that after discovering the brush fire was not a threat, the workers noticed "A very large, 'lenticular' dish on the ground." Hmm. Ok. This caller was benign and non-threatening, but another possible resident of Crazy Town. I stayed on the line with him, though, as he was well-spoken and aside from the content of his conversation, seemed credible.

The plot thickened. Mr. Ramsey had been investigating the crash since a trip to Durango in 1987. He said that he had heard the story and, while not an active UFO investigator, was intrigued by what he was told. Eventually his investigation led to writing a book; the image he was searching for was for said book.

According to Mr. Ramsey, Pastor Brown had been driving on Highway 550 on that morning of March 25, 1948. "The preacher told friends that he had just come back from the Aztec area and had noticed a lot of activity on Hart Canyon Road. He said he had gone to see if he could be of assistance and came across the activity around the downed disk. Brown said the military had whisked spectators away, but not before he administered last rites to 'little bodies' scattered around the crash site."

It seems that Pastor Brown was quite disturbed by what he said he saw, confiding in a few close friends before departing from the Four Corners area forever. Walt Sayre, a Mancos resident, heard the story along with his then 17-year old son. The son had since moved to Montana. Mr. Ramsey gave me the son's name and phone number. I called him and he confirmed what Mr. Ramsey had told me, that the unnerved pastor had told in his father and him what he saw, and soon after, left Colorado to points unknown. The son, now elderly, sounded like a no-nonsense rancher-type, but was happy to confirm the story.

Ok, I was convinced it was worth a dig through the Mancos Times morgue - but I thought that I perhaps had an interesting story for the paper as well. Iffy, but interesting - better check with my boss on this one.

Suzy was unphased, as always. "Oh, yes. I've seen them," she said, referring to UFOs. That stopped me cold - Suzy is the calmest, most rational woman on earth. But it seemed she's seen it ALL.

She went on to tell me that early one evening she was driving east from Cortez to cover a Mancos school board meeting as the Mancos Times editor. It was a little pre-dusk, and she had made it past the Mesa Verde turnoff where the terrain rises a quick 700 feet. She said she noticed purple lights in a triangle shape rising over the top of the La Platas. "I didn't pay that much attention at first, until I noticed how FAST the light formation was moving," she said. From where Suzy was, the La Platas were a good ten miles away, but the light formation was hovering overhead in the blink of an eye.

"I should have been terrified, but I wasn't. I pulled the car over and got out, looking up at the lights. After a few minutes, the formation did a 90 degree turn to the south and shot off over Mesa Verde." She added that she was stunned, but went on to the school board meeting. Suzy didn't tell anyone about the experience for years, fearing loss of her hard-won credibility; "They called me a radical lesbian," she would remind me, when I was feeling particularly besieged.

I never found a picture of Pastor Brown, but did spend more time interviewing Mr. Ramsey and finally writing a story - the full article can be found here. When I asked locals about the long UFO tradition in the Four Corners, they were matter-of-fact and unexcited, although Mr. Ramsey told me later that he had received several calls from Mancos residents after the article ran.

Of course, any number of conspiracy theory and UFO Web sites picked the story up about 30 seconds after the paper (print and online versions) was out. My name is now Google-linked forever with this weirdness.

While I never saw, or really looked for, UFOs in the sky after this story, I always looked at things in a slightly changed light. I was discovering almost every week that things around Mancos were always stranger than I could imagine.