by Charles Lear
New Mexico is famous for its reports of landed (and crashed) UFOs and associated creatures. While many might think that these sorts of reports have long since ceased since the golden age of UFOs, there was a report just a couple of years ago of creatures and a huge landed craft in the mountains of Taos, NM.
According to an article by Staci Matlock in the September 5, 2019 Taos News, days before, on September 1, two bow hunters, Josh Brinkley, 41, and Daniel Lucero, 26, were looking for elk on Pot Mountain northwest of Taos. Brinkley had been coming to the mountain for fifteen years while it was the first visit for Lucero.
They set up on opposite sides of a field and waited for three hours with no luck. At around 9:30 a.m., Brinkley became restless and went walking through the woods looking for elk there. He got to the top of the mountain, which was the rim of a collapsed volcano known as a caldera. There, he saw what he thought were two fellow hunters about 35 yards away. He was preparing to speak to them when they disappeared. According to him, “They were gone, just gone.”
The more Brinkley thought about the figures he had seen, the less like hunters they seemed. He saw only their torsos above the brush that covered their lower half. They seemed to have been wearing large hoods that had what looked like pairs of ribbons on both sides that came to a point at the top and bottom. The left side was white and somewhat shiny and the right side was black. He described their torsos as “kind of black.”
Brinkley went back down the mountain and met up with Lucero. He didn’t tell Lucero what he’d seen until they were back at camp.
The next day was Labor Day and the two headed out early in the morning for another day of hunting. They were again unable to find any elk and they gave up at around 2:30 p.m. They were mystified as to why there were no elk and got into a Jeep to drive around and see if there were other hunters or off-road vehicles driving around that were scaring them off. As they drove, they noticed that there were no signs of any wildlife in the area.
After about 10 minutes, they saw what they thought was a base camp or a set for a movie production about a quarter mile away. They both worked as carpenters in the New Mexico film industry, and as the industry was expanding in the state at that time, this was a reasonable assumption.
Brinkley described what they saw as a structure like a 50 to 60 foot tall circus tent. Coming off of it from the left was a long building that was a third of the height of the tent-like structure and “maybe a couple hundred feet” long. It reminded Brinkley of an archery lane building. Brinkley later took the time to make a sketch of the structure as well as of the creatures he had seen.
They drove down into a dip and lost sight of the structure for about five seconds and when they came out of it, according to Brinkley, “it was gone. Just gone.” Lucero added, “There was no dust. There was nothing.”
They drove around until dark and were unable to relocate the structure. When they got to an area that had mobile phone service, they called some friends to tell them what they’d seen. They thought about calling the Air Force, but a friend gave them the number of Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, and they called him instead.
Davenport confirmed that the men had called and described their story as “dramatic.” He told Matlock, “If it is true, it is profoundly unsettling.” He said that after listening to over 350,000 phone calls over 25 years he thought he could tell which ones were credible and he believed that this story was one of them.
Brinkley said he hadn’t believed in UFOs or aliens before this experience “but I sure do now.” Lucero said he wasn’t sure about UFOs or aliens but he did know he’d “never seen anything that big just disappear.”
While this case doesn’t appear to have been investigated further, another Northern New Mexico sighting on September 5, 2019 of a UFO that appeared to have landed was reported to the Mutual UFO Network and investigated by New Mexico MUFON Field Investigator John Fegel. The report is included in the “UFO Activity Report” in the November 2019 MUFON Journal.
The witness was in Jamestown, New Mexico, which is southwest of Taos, in the northwest part of the state. According to the report, at 11:30 p.m., the witness was going outside with their dog when they saw “an immense yellow light” coming through the trees of a forest to the west. The witness’s first thought was that the forest was on fire. After moving to a better vantage point, they saw that there was no fire and that the light was coming from “a huge, edgewise, half disk descending behind the trees.” The witness described the “flat side” as being on the left and estimated the size of the object as “several hundred yards long.”
Fegel closed the case (Case 103294) as Unknown – Other. While there is no evidence that this sighting is related to that of Brinkley and Lucero, they might have been comforted to know that they weren’t the only ones seeing strange things in Northern New Mexico that week.