(Note: This is the first article in a series looking into strange phenomena that has reportedly occurred in Wyoming)
Over the years, I’ve heard some strange tales of things happening in Sweetwater County.
A coworker at a former job told me about seeing a gathering of ghostly pioneers late at night on a desolate stretch of highway miles away from any town. My father, while working at the old Stansbury mine when it was owned by Arch Minerals, used to mention how he’d occasionally see metallic objects darting through the sky as he would drive along the mine’s perimeter and check the fans circulating air into the coal mine near Reliance.
On that note, someone else had told me about the possibility of an alien base somewhere nearby because people have reported seeing those metallic objects during trips to the Killpecker Sand Dunes and more remote locations in the area. I obviously can’t say there is or is not an alien presence in the desert -- though I can’t understand why advanced extraterrestrials would want to establish a base around here in the first place.
However, I have also accepted that there is a certain weirdness that can quietly make itself known when you’re least expecting it. One late summer night when I was maybe 13 or 14 years old, that weirdness revealed itself to me.
I’ve written previously about growing up near Reliance, that tiny former mining town north of Rock Springs. More specifically, I grew up in the trailer park seen before you make it to Reliance proper. I’ve always known it as the B&R Trailer Court, though it has changed owners through the years. The Arch Minerals mine my father worked at wasn’t that far from where we lived, maybe three or four miles from the trailer park.
My dad was working a graveyard shift and I was up with my mother watching some cheesy monster movie -- something like “Monster Vision with Joe Bob Briggs” on television. During a commercial break, I decided to step outside and enjoy cool breeze for a few moments.
The trailer we lived in was in a section of the mobile home park placed on a small hill everyone referred to as the “Upper Court,” which overlooked the larger, “Lower Court” section of the park. The two courts are separated by Reliance Road, which extends from U.S. 191 North to Reliance itself.
At that time, just past the Lower Court, Halliburton operated a truck and equipment yard. The yard was illuminated with industrial lights that illuminated everything there with a dirty orange hue of light. Those lights were situated above the yard on poles that extended 20-25 feet off the ground. Occasionally, you could hear the sounds of trucks idling from the yard, even late at night.
It was a silent evening and stepping outside, I could see the yard clearly because of how the trailer overlooked the Lower Court and surrounding area. However, it was what was above that Halliburton yard that caught my eye. Seemingly a few hundred feet in the air, surrounded by darkness, a glowing orange orb hovered above the yard. It didn’t move at all, as if suspended by an invisible piece of string. I called my mother outside and we watched it for a few moments, all the time it never moved and never emitted any sort of sound. It just stayed there.
I always imagined this sort of experience to cause some sort of existential terror as the fear of being noticed by whatever it was would resulted in quickly hiding and waiting for the thing to do whatever it was it doing and leave. That didn’t happen.
We simply watched it while trying to figure out what it was -- quickly building a list of things we knew it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be a flare because a flare would raise from wherever it was shot from and fall back to earth. It couldn’t be an aircraft because some sort of movement would have been noticeable. The same is true with it being a drone -- even through the technology didn’t really exist outside of military applications at the time.
After a few moments the glowing orb simply dimmed itself out of existence. It didn’t quickly vanish, like a light being shut off. The glow gradually faded before disappearing completely. We looked at the night sky for a few more moments before going back inside.
So, what is it then? Good question, because more than 20 years later, I still don’t have an idea. An unidentified flying object in its truest sense -- through “unidentified stationary glowing object” is a much better description. That said, I’ve always wondered if we were looking at something of extraterrestrial design or if we simply could not identify something of a more terrestrial origin.
Despite never finding out whatever it was I looked at all those years ago, it hasn’t stopped me from occasionally looking into the sky late at night, wondering if I will see anything like that again.
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