by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
On November 24, researcher/investigator Christopher O’Brien died in a tragic mishap. According to the post by Loren Coleman on his site Cryptozoonews, O’Brien was staying at the house of Ron James in Sedona, Arizona, helping him with the sequel to his film, Accidental Truth, when he started experiencing what James described as “catastrophic breathing difficulties” and tried to drive himself to the hospital. According to James, he likely lost consciousness and “crashed his car into a stone sign and was fatally wounded.” James wrote that he asked for a sign from his “departed friend” as he was returning from San Francisco and stopped by the crash site. He includes a picture of what he found, which was a piece of stone on the ground with the words “Church of Chris” (the final “t” was covered by debris). O’Brien leaves behind many friends in the UFO/Paranormal community who mourn his loss and celebrate his contributions.
O’Brien was a rare breed of researcher, and his methods and integrity remain as a standard that other researchers should be measured by. He appeared on Martin’s show on December 14, 2021, where he mostly talked about a UFO data acquisition system (developed as part of the Unidentified Flying Object Data Acquisition Project) and his involvement with it. He describes duplicating footage shot in Salida, Colorado, in 1995 of what became known as the “Edwards Cigar” when he happened to see a long strand of spider web floating in the breeze and shot footage of it as it was backlit by the sun. He explains, “We need to be intellectually honest about this stuff.” He adds “I’m just as willing to debunk a case or explain it away as I am to confirm it as being high strange.
According to Coleman, O’Brien spent ten years from 1992 to 2002 looking into cases of high strangeness in the San Luis Valley of south central Colorado bounded by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the San Juan Mountains to the west. He wrote three books covering his findings: The Mysterious Valley (1996), Enter the Valley (1999), and Secrets of the Mysterious Valley (2007). He also wrote Stalking the Tricksters (2009), a book that Coleman describes as distilling “his years of field investigation and research into a unified paranormal theory.”
O’Brien’s initial investigations involved cattle mutilation, and he wrote a comprehensive 560-page (paperback edition) book on the subject titled Stalking the Herd that was published in 2014. He can be heard discussing it on Where Did the Road Go? with host Seriah Azkath in two episodes that aired May 17, 2014 and June 21, 2014.
In the first episode, O’Brien describes being brought up in a “forward-thinking” environment with a mother who grafted fruit trees, dowsed, and performed pendulum divination. He says he’d been interested in the paranormal since early childhood as his father was a friend of Roger Patterson who shot the controversial footage of an alleged bigfoot creature in 1967.
In describing the book, O’Brien goes into the history of humans’ relationships with cattle which ranges from treating them as sacred beings to treating them as a food source in rendering operations that process up to 400 head per hour. As for the cattle mutilation mystery, he considers multiple possibilities and remains open to the idea that several or any one of them could be an answer. He goes through his speculations, and these include: clandestine testing by government agents downwind of superfund sites and nuclear facilities, secret weapons testing by the military, and big agro trying to drive small ranchers out of business. He describes covering a 10,ooo square mile region in his investigation during which he put 300,000 miles on his truck.
O’Brien doesn’t rule out paranormal causes and brings up high-strangeness cases such as one instance in South America he says was reported in local papers where a 60,000-gallon water tank was found to have been drained and to have contained the bodies of 19 cattle. This being said, he considers E.T. as the least likely cause.
Besides his work in the San Luis Valley, Obrien was the first investigator to focus on what has become known as “Skinwalker Ranch” (he describes high-strangeness cases involving cattle there with Azkath), was a co-host with Gene Steinberg on The Paracast, was a regular guest on many podcast and radio shows, and has appeared on television and in movies. As a journalist, he has written for publications such as Fate, the Crestone Eagle, and Western Spirit, and was a regular speaker for decades at symposiums and conferences. He also co-produced and consulted for films such as James Fox’s The Phenomenon (2021) and Moment of Contact (2023) and he tells Martin that a friend jokingly asked if he was a “director whisperer.”
Christopher O’Brien touched numerous lives and this can be seen in the many tributes already out there so close to his passing. When asked for comment, Martin had this to say:
I feel as though he was sort of underrated for the work that he had done. As far as his personality, he was top notch guy in my book, kind, (if he liked you) and even keeled.
When he spent a week in my guesthouse, we had some wonderful long, and sometimes deep conversations in the evenings. When he left, it was spotless as if he was never there.
He never shied away from calling out grifters and could be strongly opinionated. He was also good at giving praise to people that he thought were doing something important. During one of my shows with him, he made me laugh pretty hard, uncontrollably. He had a great sense of humor and I will miss him.