Something Large, Still Unidentified....

     I still don't know what it really was.
     It was something huge, mysterious and still unidentified.
     This was back when I owned a weekly newspaper on the Colorado plains. A daughter was asleep in the
back seat of the car.  It was after dusk and a full moon was in the sky, so it was probably on the
night of the full moon, or very close to it, in September 1991.

     We had gone to Pueblo for the day and were headed home after shopping.
     We were near Arlington, which was just a post office at a ranch along Highway 96.  It was Friday and
any people in the surrounding lonesome prairie were likely at a football game in a prairie village
where people cluster under Friday night lights.  I think there was a game in Eads that night.
     As I drove, I noticed a yellow light in the sky to the north. Then I saw a separate red light. My
brain initially processed this as the lights on a low flying B-52 bomber, which used to roam this vast
section of the plains not far off the ground. They would sometimes startle a driver as one of the
huge planes suddenly appeared over them as it moved along.

     When I looked back to see if the lights had moved closer or farther, to determine which way the plane
was going, I suddenly grasped it was something else.  It was a huge cylinder stretching across the
night sky north of the highway.  The two lights were at either end of it.
     Because of the full moon I could clearly make out the skyline of the prairie to the north, toward
distant Karval which was over there somewhere.
     This huge shape was just hanging in the sky.
     Then I noted in my rear view mirrors a bright light was following behind my car, maybe a quarter mile
back.  It was going the same speed as I was.  It was this disturbing light that kept me from stopping
to take a closer look at the huge cylinder thing hanging in the sky.

     Mile after mile I drove along, feeling a little fear, I admit.  And then a railroad berm to keep snow
off the tracks rose up and I lost view of the cylinder. But the bright white light was still tracking
me.
     The headlights of an oncoming  car suddenly appeared on the horizon miles ahead, near Haswell, the
highest point in Kiowa County and from which you could glimpse the distant Rockies before the ground
descended and you lost site of them again until you got much closer to Pueblo.
      When that distant car appeared, the white light behind me suddenly stopped dead in mid air and I
started to move away from it...and the mysterious large object in the sky.

     A few days later I took my story to Gary Rehm, then sheriff of Kiowa County. I knew years earlier he
had spent many nights chasing down cattle mutilation reports through southern Colorado. I expected him
to ridicule me and my tall tale, but he just accepted what I said and told me it was good I had not
stopped.
      He said if I had stopped I would have been shot at with a laser weapon, referring to the rifles that
use a laser beam to zero in on a target.  In his opinion, he said a drug drop was going on.  And if I
had stopped that is why we would have been shot at.
     I don't think he understood the full image of what I had seen. The huge cylinder seemed to be solid.
     But years later I concede it might have been a holographic projection in the sky to scare people away
from what might have been a large truck unloading drugs somewhere on the pasture lands beneath it.
It is unlikely that an interstellar craft would have to send out what might have been a helicopter
with a bright headlight to protect it.

     So I still don't really know what I saw that night. But I still have a visual image of it in my mind.
No, I did not wake up my daughter to take a look. Something like that would have really spooked her
anyway.
     A few years later I was living in suburban Denver and one night while perusing the Internet I came
across several reports, from both the east and west coast, of giant cylindrical craft in the sky that
seemed to be three fourths of a mile long. That seemed to match the description of what I saw.  It was
like one of the cigar shaped craft George Adamski had written about years earlier in his books.
     So I went to the National UFO Reporting Center site, NUFORC, and decided to post what I had seen.
      Though the report was then several years old, it was posted and is part of their data base still, I
assume.

     That is one of the times I have seen something strange in the sky. It was the most dramatic.  Glad
what I saw that particular night has not  repeated on those many dark nights I drove home from Denver
in recent years from Limon to Rocky Ford, another long stretch of very lonely road.