NUFORC Sighting 69295

Occurred: 1997-10-17 20:00 Local
Reported: 2009-03-20 04:38 Pacific
Duration: 1 hour
No of observers: 3

Location: Ignacio, CO, USA

Shape: Triangle
Characteristics: Lights on object, Emitted beams, Changed Colo

Three triangular shapes with extended "legs" floating southwest over SW Colorado NW New Mexico mountains.

I have seen UFOs all of my adult life...starting in the Calif./ Mojave desert in 1965/ throughout the late sixties in the panhandle of Texas during college. ....and throughout a college teaching career in the early eighties in the panhandle.

I moved to the Aztec, NM area in the late nineties from Durango, Colorado. On October 17 of 1997 two friends and I were driving west on a county road (318) just outside Ignacio, Co. This road is heavily traveled and is on the Ute reservation with a mountain range parallel on the southern boundary...the road then descends into a pronounced canyon before meeting the major HWY 550 Corridor from Aztec to Durango.

On this evening at about 8:17 p.m.we had just gone four miles west and looked up in the sky towards the southwest and above the mountains....and pulled to the side of the road to listen and look.

Only one other car passed us going east at this time.

A very ,very large triangular shaped " ship" with extremely long " pole/legs" was moving to the southwest....and within these pole/legs were a pink and very red swirling energy of light and motion...as if the poles were "sucking up the matter/plants/dirt of the hills and mesas near the mountains. There was absolutely no sound and the size and scale of these legs and "ship" are still beyond my memory's ability to compute. My friends and I just kept asking what it was...and kept watching and not believing the size of the objects in our view.

We then drove three more miles west to get another perspective and to see if the ship was moving...we then saw two smaller (relatively speaking) triangles a little higher in the sky and definitely moving southwest.

The larger ship was perceptibly moving and I used a fist measurement I learned from someone to gauge height in the sky...I counted seven fists high the one pole/leg nearest us.

We then drove two more miles west to look back...again no sounds, no airplanes overhead, no animal sounds....and we could look back and see all three pole/legs from that view....the legs were so long/large that it appeared that two tornado shapes on top of each other were swirling and picking up matter.

We then drove into Bondad canyon and slowed to look back and could not see the objects any longer....and when we reached Hwy 550 and looked east toward the mountains and the canyon...there was nothing to see.

We then drove south to our river home and looked back from the driveway....and saw nothing.

I called my brother in Albuquerque (167 miles away) just to see if anything was on the news....and we tuned into local radio.

I called the airport in Farmington, NM and the college observatory the next day...and nothing had been reported.

My friends have really never referenced this event again...and for twelve years I have carried a sense of forever being changed by what we witnessed.

I have spent years on the web looking for any other experience similar...especially the pole/legs whirling pink/and red tornado like motions....with no sound.

I hope I can speak at length to someone about this event.

Aztec has a UFO site northeast of the city on Hart Mountain....when I look at the trajectory of the "ships" of October 1997....they were definitely running parallel to Hart Mountain.

Posted 2009-04-14