Close encounters

“I’d just fallen asleep – only slipped off – when they paralyzed me,” my new hairdresser explained. Casually cutting my locks, she nipped off some of the shag, spun the chair a few degrees and added, “At first a beam of light surrounded my form. Then suddenly I was floating up through the room, straight into the attic, through the metal roof and into the belly of a gleaming, silver ship.”

Days before the cut, a couple of close friends had promised me my most entertaining trim ever. There I was, two strokes of the scissors, already getting much more than my money’s worth. The interplanetary kidnappers in question were a half-dozen roving Grays – 4-foot tall bluish gray aliens with amphibian features – who simply wanted to make contact with the barber.

“After that first visit, I was suddenly able to see and hear things,” she boasted, zipping off a big chunk of hair with the clippers. “They now use me as a conduit, a way of communicating their good intentions to the human race.”

Two months later, I returned to her chair, unable to resist the temptation. Now that I was a semi-regular, Madame Scissors felt secure enough to tell me about a ride in another species of saucer. You see, a darker, militant race of outworlders has also been known to visit the Western Slope, she added. These “reptoid” creatures travel in dark cylinders, resembling nothing more than a flock of oversized, charred tofu pups. In the late 1980s, the woman watched as a dozen of the tubesteaks flew in formation over a nearby reservoir. Things got pretty blurry for my barber at that point. When she came to, her unborn child was missing, and the only evidence was a star-shaped scar on her abdomen.

“They’re already among us, I’m sure you know that,” she said in a motherly voice. “They’ve been visiting the Rocky Mountains for thousands of years. The peaks are their sentinels, markers of sorts, and draw them in ... Now do you wanna see that scar?”

By many accounts, little green men have been making scenic stopovers in the solar system for eons. Judging by the number of local tales of contact I’ve heard, the Four Corners might just be the first stop for the intergalactic tour bus. And more than a few West Slopers (visit this weekend’s UFO conference in Aztec for the hard evidence) have allegedly been sucked up into the saucer, where they enjoy a few Saturn snax and some harmless brain alteration before returning unharmed (some to high political office).

“What a bunch of bunk,” replied a friend and amateur ‘pharmacist.’ “Everyone knows that aliens don’t scoot around the solar system in saucers. That’s totally absurd.

“Extraterrestrials travel inter-dimensionally,” he quickly added. “They’re able to bend the space-time continuum and appear wherever, whenever at will.”

“They’re going to revolutionize our entire society,” the apothecary assured me. “We’re just not quite ready for them to reveal themselves.”

A certain middle-aged Colorado artist and horse fanatic would also happily share her tales of alien contact with anyone who’d listen. In bursts of frenzied movement and hyper speech, she’d proclaim, “The local visitors are called Arkadians. Trust me, they’re not little green men.” No these were big, olive-colored androgynoids sporting hairless skin and slits for eyes.

On a certain date (which shall remain unnamed), our artist led me out into a random field, which was bull’s eyed by a large circle of perfectly black, roughly saucer-shaped, loamy soil. “Nothing to worry about,” she assured me at the landing zone. “They’re totally peaceful. Just getting the lay of the land. Go ahead and touch the dirt. It’s heavily charged with negative ions.”

I politely declined the offer, asking instead how she knew about the visitors. “Shane told me,” she smiled, pointing back at her horse.

And so you might ask, am I believer? Let’s just say I sitting comfortably on the fence awaiting harder evidence.

In the years since getting those haircuts, receiving my prescription and personally soiling myself, I’ve always kept a wary eye on the heavens. Hell, I’ve even visited Aztec’s UFO crash site more than a dozen times (happily encountering some of the Four Corners finest singletrack and slickrock on each pass).

But the truth is that my favorite species of space invader still drives a car with green and white plates. He or she is always in the next aisle at the grocery, bellied up at the bar or happily out at pasture. And we can all give thanks to the San Juans for the unusual beings and their presence here. “They’ve been visiting the Rocky Mountains for dozens of years,” I remind myself. “The peaks just draw them in.”

– Will Sands