Noe Torres - 16 July

The Real

Cowboys

& Aliens

UFO Encounters of the Old West

By

Noe Torres and John LeMay

Illustrated by

Jared Olive and Neil Riebe

2nd Edition

Edinburg, Texas

2012 by Noe Torres and John LeMay . All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1477501894

ISBN-10: 1477501894

2nd Edition

Front Cover Art by Joe Calkins of CerberusArt.com

Chapter Heading Illustrations by Neil Riebe

Printed in the United States of America

To all the amazing monsters, fictional and otherwise, that gave us cold sweats and kept us awake at night as kids.

Contents

From the beginning of time, human beings have seen strange things in the sky. For example, the Bible tells the story of the prophet Ezekiel seeing an astonishing flying object landing and blasting off right in front of him. Several paintings of the Renaissance era clearly show flying saucers streaking across the sky. Also, ancient sea farers and explorers reported seeing UFOs hovering above them. Even the cowboys and ranchers of Americas Old West occasionally witnessed strange flying objects.

Many people think that the flying saucer phenomena began in the 1940s. The idea that cowboys of the Old West may have encountered aliens seems very unlikely to them. Cowboys meeting aliens seems to be a theme strictly for comic books and blockbuster movies. But in reality, there exist many newspaper and magazine accounts from the 1800s telling of strange sightings and encounters from Americas cowboy era. Included in these stories are sudden encounters with strange beings that were clearly not human.

What is especially interesting about these historic UFO sightings is that they took place before airplanes were invented and before manned flight was common. Although hot air balloons had been around since the 1700s, it was closer to 1900 before balloon airships became widely known.

Because airplanes and spaceships were unknown in the 1800s, people who saw strange things in the sky usually described them by comparing them to known objects like cigars and balloons. The term flying saucer was not generally used for UFOs until the 1940s, but a Texas farmer who saw a UFO in 1878 described it as a large saucer.

Since this was long before the era of jet planes and spacecraft, the cowboys and farmers of the 1800s often struggled to put into words what they had witnessed. Unless a UFO slowed down enough to where they could observe it carefully, most of the Old West residents probably didnt take much notice. Vapor trails in the daytime and streaks of light at night likely did not make much of an impression on these hardened pioneers. These sights were just part of the signs and wonders that often appeared in the heavens.

Based on the historical records of these unexplained sightings, it seems that UFOs were quite common in the 1800s. We have found hundreds of newspaper and magazine accounts about people seeing strange objects and lights in the sky. We have also found articles that mention face-to-face encounters with creatures that seemed human but were clearly not.

So when the 2011 motion picture Cowboys & Aliens was released, some UFO researchers were upset because they felt the film was not a true depiction of these Old West UFO cases. Truthfully, though, director Jon Favreau and the films writers were probably not even aware that there were actual UFO sightings in the 1800s. Favreaus entertaining, fictional film was never meant to depict reality. Based upon a comic book by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, the film was meant to blend the action of a Western with the intrigue of a science fiction alien invasion movie.

Did the film, even just by coincidence, have any similarities to the real UFO encounters described in this book? Well, sort of. Admittedly, the UFOs in the movie were not based on any ships seen by actual people. However, the UFOs in the film were certainly more cigar shaped rather than saucer shaped. Cigar-shaped objects were definitely common in the UFO sightings of the 19th century.

Also, in the films abduction scenes, the aliens used a sort of lasso to capture people and pull them up into their ships. In 1897, witnesses described a cigar-shaped UFO that lassoed a cow and took it away into the night (see Chapter 14).

As is typical of recent Hollywood alien movies, the extraterrestrials in Cowboys & Aliens came to Earth to steal our natural resources in this case, gold. That idea may sound silly, but it makes sense when you consider that so many Western movies were about mining gold or finding buried treasure. To have aliens engaged in the same sort of activity is a nice, clever twist.

Actually, ETs looking for gold is not as weird a concept as you may think. According to legends from ancient Sumer [modern Iraq], a race of extraterrestrials called the Anunnaki reportedly extracted gold from the bowels of the Earth about 400,000 years ago.

In reality, some of the true UFO reports you are about to read may actually be stranger than fiction. Among the many bizarre stories is the one about a man from outer space whose spaceship crashed in North Texas and whose body was buried in a lonely Texas cemetery where it may still remain today. You will also read about a flying monster shot by two cowboys outside of Tombstone, Arizona. There is also a tale about an underwater UFO that came up to the surface and nearly electrocuted two men. You will also hear the tale of a strange flying beast that terrorized a small Midwest town. Did these strange encounters really happen as recorded, or were they the products of overworked imaginations? Well let you, our readers, decide for yourselves.

The Rocky Mountains are a huge mountain range that stretches more than 3,000 miles from Canada all the way to faraway New Mexico. The Rockies play an important role in many Old West stories and legends. The Rockies were home to many Native American tribes and to the Mountain Men, true pioneers of the Old West who braved natures elements to survive. Many of these men were fur trappers who dedicated themselves to catching animals like beavers so that they could sell their fur. It is with a fur trapper that we start our look at UFO encounters in the Old West.

James Lumley was a fur trapper in Montana, who witnessed what many people now believe was the crash landing of a UFO in the Rocky Mountains. What he experienced is one of the most interesting UFO cases of the 1800s.

In September 1864, Lumley was high in the mountains, trapping in an area known as Cadotte Pass. One night, after the sun had gone down, he saw a bright object streak through the sky. A newspaper article that appeared later in the Cincinnati Commercial described the object as a bright, luminous body in the heavens, which was moving with a great rapidity in an easterly direction.

About five seconds after Lumley spotted it, the large object in the sky split into several smaller pieces with a flash like a sky-rocket. Is it possible that the large object was a mother ship and that several smaller scout ships were expelled from it to the Earth below?

Moments later, Lumley heard and felt a tremendous explosion that shook the ground below his feet. This was followed by an eerie wind that swept through the forest with a loud rushing sound. There was also the distinctive smell of sulfur in the air, as when gunpowder is lit.