UFO Watchtower Guide

In 2000, cattle rancher Judy Messoline gave up on cows and built a ten-foot steel viewing platform two miles north of Hooper on Highway 17 — the “Cosmic Highway” — betting that the San Luis Valley’s decades of strange-lights reports would draw people willing to stand and watch the dark. She was right. The platform looks out over one of the flattest, highest, emptiest valleys in America, ringed by fourteeners, and below it sits the “healing garden”: a chain-link-and-junk shrine where visitors leave rings, sunglasses, photos, and dog tags by the thousands, and where two psychics say a pair of interdimensional portals sit. Whether you buy any of it or not, this is a genuine piece of American roadside folk art built by one stubborn woman, and the valley really is dark enough to see things you can’t explain.