UFO Watchtower

The San Luis Valley is a flat alpine basin at 7,600 feet, nearly the size of New Jersey with maybe 50,000 residents, pinched between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo ranges beside Great Sand Dunes National Park. It has produced reports of strange lights since the 1960s, plus the valley's two other signature files: Native American folklore of Ant People rising from the dunes, and a long ledger of unexplained livestock mutilations — including the valley's most famous animal, Snippy the horse, found dead in 1967 with the flesh stripped from her head and neck in the case that defined the era's cattle-mutilation panic. Messoline bought Snippy's skeleton in 2021 for $2,000 and displays it at the tower.

The operation is honest commerce: a ten-foot platform on Highway 17, a campground, a geodesic gift shop full of little-green-man merchandise, and a three-ring binder of handwritten sighting reports. People had been camping on her land to watch the sky without permission before she built it — the market found her first. Roughly ten thousand people a year now climb it, and the site passed to her son Larry's management while she kept the register.

The binder is the file: some three hundred sightings recorded at or from the tower, including Messoline's own cigar-shaped bronze object that zipped low across the valley in 2000 with more than a dozen people watching beside her. "I've had 30," she told NPR flatly. "The closest one was between here and the mountains... narrow, really long, and it went zip like that." She logs the reports, shares some video with Air Force officers who, she says, monitor the watchtower's website, and keeps a standing request that whoever is up there land so she can ask what's going on.

The archive notes the observer-quality problem cuts both ways here: the witnesses include ranchers who can tell a satellite from a coyote at distance, and the phenomena reported — hovering triangles, balls of fire, movers that turn at absurd angles — are the same register the valley has filed for sixty years, before the tower and the gift shop existed to need them.

The watchtower still charges five dollars, sells socks, and keeps the binder open. Messoline jokes she built it for the money and became a believer on the job — the file's preferred order of operations. The record keeps a barn conversion, a $2,000 horse skeleton and a county permit for an attraction nobody else had thought to monetize. The legend keeps Ant People and mutilations. The sky, per the log, keeps filing — and the valley's new congressional-hearing-era tourists keep arriving to check the totals.