Review by Ed Quillen
UFOs – February 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
Enter the Valley – UFOS, Religious Miracles, Cattle Mutilations, and Other Unexplained Phenomena in the San Luis Valley
by Christopher O’Brien
Published in 1999 by St. Martin’s Press
ISBN 0-312-96835-3
IT WAS A PLEASANT, WARM AFTERNOON. It might have been in August. I was sitting on the patio, enjoying a beer and listening to “All Things Considered” when I noticed an eviscerated robin lying a few feet away.
Then the signal on the $29.95 Wal-Mart boombox began to drift, and when I looked up into the azure sky, I saw a bright disk flitting around, high in the air. I watched it for a minute or two and went indoors to get the binoculars for a better look. Alas, upon my return, it had vanished.
That we have a tomcat who preys on birds and devours their soft innards, that cheap stereos have cheap tuners that don’t hold an FM signal well, that a kid’s helium balloon could have gotten loose to flit around the atmosphere — well, that’s what they want you to think.
After reading Enter the Valley, I’m now aware that there have been two notorious UFO sightings in this area in late August, just when I might have experienced this cosmic combination of radio reception difficulty, a mutilated animal, and a strange object in the sky, and further, the observers “shared the name Edwards.”
Hey, I’m an Edward, and author Christopher O’Brien is “convinced that these connections are important.” He doesn’t know how or why, but he’s “working on it.”
O’Brien has taken it upon himself to investigate weird stuff in and around the San Luis Valley. He writes in breathless prose (what he hears or reads is often “compelling,” whether it’s a story in The Mountain Mail or that two unrelated people have the same last name) and features his own adventures with ghosts in the house, lights in the sky, noises from the earth, etc.
He also claims to conduct extensive research, interviewing people who claim to have seen mysterious fogs or aircraft flying into Mt. Blanca, or inspecting mutilated cattle or the like.
But it’s hard to take him at his word. Granted, I had no easy way to check his UFO research. So much that happens more or less in the open around here — beliefs concerning the presence or absence of a vast underground reservoir in the Valley, the vagaries of Salida municipal politics, the future of the rail line over Tennessee Pass — is so weird that I’ve never felt much need to look to the earth below or the sky above for anomalies.
But on mundane matters that could be checked with an afternoon or two in a library, O’Brien stumbles badly.
HE MENTIONS “the massive Rio Grande Rift, which runs from Salida into Mexico.” “Massive” means “of solid construction,” and a rift is the result of faults which mean unsolid construction, so a rift can’t be massive. He probably meant “extensive,” but publishers these days apparently rely on UFOs or chants, rather than copy editors, to go over manuscripts.
And any geologist would tell him that the Rio Grande Rift formation starts north of Leadville, more than 60 miles from Salida.
We learn that “just north of Blanca Peak and the Great Sand Dunes, the largest and most extensive cave system in Colorado is located.” And all my other books say Colorado’s big cavern systems are up by Glenwood Springs.
He puts Grand Junction “150 miles north of the San Luis Valley.” He has the Sangre summits scraping “the Colorado Plateau sky” when the Colorado Plateau is in Arizona and Utah, a long way from the San Luis Valley.
He has cannibal Alfred Packer getting captured, years after his escape from Saguache, “in Wagonmound, Montana,” when he was really captured at Wagon Hound Creek, near Douglas, Wyoming.
O’Brien has Packer and his 1873 party bound for the San Juans from Utah, when in fact they were bound for the Breckenridge area, and he has the cannibal camp on the “South Fork” when it’s on the Lake Fork of the Gunnison.
Nitpicking? Yes. But the point is this: If O’Brien won’t bother to get these simple matters right, stuff that often doesn’t take more than an oil-company road map, how can you trust him when he starts passing along tales of UFOs, mutilated cattle, horses stuck in trees, fog banks that follow property lines, glowing balls of electricity, mysterious martial aircraft, Pueblo Indians who had seen a “bilocated nun” who was in Spain at the same time, giant underground military bases, and sundry other wonders?
The book does read smoothly and quickly, and he throws in so much — everything from old Spanish lost treasure lore to a continental network of secret military tunnels — that you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all this weirdness that somehow escaped your notice as you placidly went about your life in the Greater San Luis Valley and its adjacent “bioregions,” unaware that Old Scratch himself might be lurking at the dancehall or that what you thought was a tumbleweed on Highway 17 might have really been a ground dragon.
The only cosmic connection he seems to have left out is that in early 1945, the Manhattan Project authorities were looking for a test site for the first atomic bomb. They put the San Luis Valley, along with Padre Island off Texas, on the short list before they settled on Jornada del Muerto in New Mexico, and that’s the same state that has Roswell, and hey, this can’t all be a coincidence, right? And it can’t be just happenstance that O’Brien didn’t include this — what’s he trying to cover up?
As entertainment goes, I’ve read worse — in fact, most of what I read isn’t nearly as amusing as this collection of sightings, stitched along a narrative of O’Brien’s dedicated career.
BUT AS SOMETHING trustworthy or informative, well, it’s a fine piece of modern mythology, trying to justify itself with new-age babble like “The very fact that people believe that these apparitions are real may actually help them manifest into our reality.”
Huh?
Oh well. Thousands of people will read this book and decide they must join the extra-terrestrials in visiting the sacred and enchanted zones of the San Luis Valley and environs, from Salida to Walsenburg, Creede, and Taos.
Start cranking out those crystal skulls and holistic home-grown herbs, get them on the shelves, and stand back and wait for the pilgrims to roll in, ready to spend their money on genuine fifth-dimension Mother Earth tachyon paraphernalia.
O’Brien’s got this hustle figured out, and it’s not his fault that many of the rest of us just aren’t sufficiently enlightened to see where the money is these days — a long way from reality.
–Ed Quillen