Close Encounters from Big Sky Country

“It was frustrating,” Howard says, “because we thought, ‘Boy, we’re onto something big here. We’re going to get this figured out right away.’ It went on for a year and a half or more, and to this day I don’t have a clue.”

His confusion and frustration derive from a confounding paradox: The most likely explanation he can come up with for what happened is also the most difficult explanation to prove. As far as Howard can tell, though he can’t say for certain, extraterrestrials came to Teton County in spaceships, slaughtered cattle with surgical precision, took parts of the animals’ anatomy and then vanished almost without a trace.
Montana has long been a hotbed of UFO sightings and purported extraterrestrial encounters. In 1932, Leo Dworshak, who spent his life in Montana and North Dakota, experienced one of the world’s first reported alien contacts. In 1950, a Great Falls man caught a supposed UFO on film for the first time in U.S. history. In 1967, a Malmstrom Air Force Base nuclear missile silo near the town of Roy was temporarily shut down after UFOs were spotted in the vicinity. In 1998, 1999 and 2000, crop circles were discovered near Whitefish and Kalispell.
Last year, Joan Bird, who has a doctorate in zoology from the University of Montana and lives in Helena, published Montana UFOs and Extraterrestrials, a detailed account of these and other significant sightings and encounters from around the Treasure State. For those who study UFOs and other related phenomena, the accounts Bird relates are among the world’s most important cases of alien civilizations visiting Earth.
The findings are not relegated to the past. Just in the past few months, clusters of red dots, teardrop-shaped objects, fireballs, chevrons, white flashes, triangular craft and green orbs have all been spotted in Montana and reported to the National UFO Reporting Center. Last November, for example, two “orb-like and rather large” craft were spotted flying above Rattlesnake Creek. This February, Missoulian Nick Lechner spotted six “large balls of light” moving and drifting above the South Hills. On July 4, Tommy Evans, a friend, a cousin and an uncle all witnessed “an incredibly bright, deep-orange [colored] object slowly moving” above Missoula.
While reports like these continue to come in and further fuel speculation of aliens among us, skeptics shake their heads and dismiss them out of hand. The accounts seem fuzzy, the evidence flimsy. And alternate, rational explanations often abound. But for a number of Montanans, including reputable members of the community like Judge Howard, the truth­ is out there-and they’re trying to track it down.
Richard O’Connor, an anesthesiologist at Helena’s St. Peter’s Hospital, has never seen a UFO, but he’s convinced they exist and that at least some them of them are spacecraft piloted and crewed by extraterrestrials. The evidence, he says, is overwhelming.
“People that say there’s no evidence, they just haven’t investigated it,” he says. “If they look, they’ll find.”
O’Connor began to look in earnest some 25 years ago, after seeing a TV show about the Roswell UFO incident and hearing a familiar name.
In popular culture, Roswell is practically shorthand for the crazy conspiracy-theorizing of those who believe extraterrestrials have visited earth. Despite the mockery, the truth about what happened in the New Mexico desert in 1947 has been the subject of genuine uncertainty and suspicion. It’s a fact, for example, that soon after a strange object crashed on a ranch outside the town of Roswell in 1947, U.S. Air Force officials declared that the wrecked object was a “flying disk.” Though the Air Force quickly retracted that characterization and produced wreckage of a weather balloon to provide a new explanation, the official story has continued to change and accusations of a cover-up have been persistent. 

Those accusations were given great weight in 1978, when a former Air Force intelligence officer, Maj. Jesse Marcel, came forward to report that the UFO was an extraterrestrial-piloted spacecraft. He said he had been the initial investigator of the alien wreckage and that the military had conspired to deceive the public about what happened. Marcel’s allegations sparked more controversy about what really occured in Roswell. It was Marcel’s name that sounded familiar to O’Connor that night, while watching TV.
O’Connor had a colleague at the hospital with almost the same name. Jesse Marcel Jr., who died last year, worked as an ear, nose and throat surgeon at St. Peter’s. O’Connor sometimes anesthetized his patients.
“And I was like ‘Jesse Marcel? Could that be?’” O’Connor says.
Marcel’s father was, indeed, Maj. Marcel. The doctor was 11 years old in 1947, and he had vivid memories of seeing wreckage his father brought home from the crash site. The material he saw, Marcel told O’Connor, was clearly not of this planet. There was a strange kind of foil that, his father later told him, could not be permanently dented, not even with a sledgehammer. There were metallic-looking beams with indecipherable purple geometric symbols inscribed in the surface. And there were no wires, tubes or any evidence of electronics. This was material from a flying saucer, Marcel’s father told him, and he wasn’t to tell anyone what he’d seen.
O’Connor found Marcel’s story intriguing. He’d long thought “how really ridiculous it would be if we were the only sentient species in the universe,” and Marcel’s account confirmed O’Connor’s long-held suspicion that travelers from alien civilizations could and would visit planet Earth.
“I just know that his story’s true,” O’Connor says. “There’s no possible way that he would have lied to me, to his family and to the entire world, really, about that event that happened there if he didn’t believe himself that it was what he said it was. I’m just 100 percent confident of that, so it sort of distills in me the surety that I need to do something like this.”
“This” is the Jesse A. Marcel Library, a collection of books and DVDs housed in a converted garage on a dirt driveway just south of Helena and just below O’Connor’s home. The space is spare, with a concrete floor, a gas fireplace flickering in the corner and a model UFO made from two drum cymbals hanging from the ceiling. The model was made and donated to the museum by a man who said he saw the real thing hovering over Whitefish Lake.
“I keep my camper in here, which is back there behind the curtain,” O’Connor says, gesturing to some hanging tarps that divide the library from the rest of the garage. “I guess that was the primary reason that I built the building to begin with.”
O’Connor is a kind and gentle man, with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wears a yellow Jesse A. Marcel Library, or JAML, T-shirt and round glasses, and he speaks with a soft Southern drawl. He built the garage in 2011 and opened the library a year later.

“I had collected quite a number of books on my own of stuff that interested me about the subject,” he says. “And then I just started thinking, ‘Well, what would help to legitimize this subject with the public? And what would help to educate the public?’ And obviously the answer was to open a library, so people would have access to my materials.”
His bookshelves are lined with everything from Richard Dolan’s two volume UFOs and the National Security State to Michel Mesmarquet’s Abduction to the Ninth Planet: A True Report by the Author Who Was Physically Abducted to Another Planet to Paul Hill’s Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis. He also has a shelf of DVDs containing testimony, reenactments, clips and documentaries on subjects ranging from the possible extraterrestrial origins of Sumerian civilization to a spate of alien visitations in Deer Lodge.
O’Connor goes to his collection with great enthusiasm, eager to share the insight it contains about humans’ experiences with UFOs and extraterrestrials, about government and corporate conspiracies to conceal and discredit these experiences, and about the nature, technology, philosophy and intention of the various alien civilizations that have visited our planet. The range of the authors’ and speakers’ insight and evidence is compelling, O’Connor says, as are their credentials.
The witnesses to the UFO phenomenon and its cover-up include NASA scientists, astronauts, military officials, doctors, physicists, FBI agents, CIA agents and one former governor, Fife Symington of Arizona. They include John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist who began to study abductees in order to determine the psychological origins of their delusion; he came to believe they had actually been physically taken by extraterrestrials. There’s also Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian minister of defence who claims extraterrestrials live on earth, and Roger Lier, a podiatric surgeon who removed nanotechnology allegedly inserted into the bodies of numerous alien abductees by their captors. There’s also Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man to walk on the moon and who believes the U.S. government is complicit in a conspiracy to hide evidence of the extraterrestrial presence on our planet.
“Why am I not going to believe these people?” O’Connor asks. “Why? Why would I not? It just doesn’t make any sense to me that these credible people would come out and make these statements if they weren’t certain that they were true.”
The JAML is more than just O’Connor’s collection. It’s also the home of the Crop Circles Research Foundation, a nonprofit O’Connor founded to fund aerial photography and study of the enormous and elaborate patterns that have long been turning up in farmers’ fields around the world. In addition, the library hosts weekly, Tuesday-night meetings for people who are interested in UFOs and extraterrestrials.
Most Tuesdays, those meetings are small and informal, with a handful of visitors gathered to watch a DVD together or to discuss a specific topic. Occasionally, more people turn up for a special event. On May 6, some 70 people came out to hear Judge Howard talk about what happened 40 years ago to cattle in Teton County.
It all started, Howard told his audience, on Memorial Day, 1975. He had been elected sheriff the previous November, despite having no law-enforcement experience, and he was on his way to Bozeman for several weeks of training. When he arrived, a phone call was waiting for him. His undersheriff was on the line. Something inexplicable had happened.

About a half hour after checking on a healthy young heifer, his undersheriff said, a rancher had found the same animal dead in his field. And not just dead, but dismembered with weird precision. Looking for an explanation, the rancher called a local veterinarian and asked him to perform a necropsy.
“So they did the necropsy,” Howard says, telling the story again, “and in the course of doing that, the veterinarian [was] looking for internal things that weren’t there. The sexual organs.”
Over the next two years, Howard estimates he responded to between 20 and 30 similar reports of suspiciously mutilated cattle. As he crisscrossed the more than 2,000 square miles of Teton County to examine specimens, a pattern began to emerge.
The cattle were generally young and female, they were generally found in the county’s flat and open graze land rather than along the Rocky Mountain Front, and they were generally discovered “fairly close to water.” Their remains turned up along streams, at springs, beside water tanks and along the banks of the Dearborn and Missouri rivers.
The condition of the cattle also fit a pattern. In most cases, they were found lying on their side, with their vaginal area “molested and removed.” Other internal sexual organs had also been excised and parts of their facial masks removed “from about the ear down to the lower jaw, extending forward to the opening of the mouth,” says Howard. Eyes had also sometimes been removed, as well as tongues. Despite being putrefied and dismembered, there was no indication the carcasses had been preyed upon by birds, coyotes or anything else but maggots.
Howard searched for a logical explanation. He grew up working on ranches, so he knew this wasn’t how cattle look when they die a natural death.
“These areas around the vaginal area, for instance—very, very smooth cuts,” he says. “The hide was gone, the flesh was not. So, it isn’t something a coyote can grab a hold of and stand there and back off and jerk and pull and twist and turn until the hide comes off. It looked as though it had been surgically removed. How it was removed, I don’t have a clue. But it sure enough wasn’t from a coyote or a grizzly bear.”
He considered, too, the possibility that humans had killed the animals. He searched for evidence. He looked for footprints and tire tracks.
Once, on a bench above Freezout Lake, south of Choteau, he responded to a call about two suspiciously dead and mutilated heifers near a little body of water surrounded by deep mud. The cattle had made a path of firmer ground that allowed them access to the water, but the heifers in question were off to the side of this path.
“And it was like they had fallen down and then someone reached out with a hook and slid them 20 to 30 feet,” Howard says. “No other marks whatever were present. None. … There isn’t any way possible somebody could have walked out there and not left a track. But there were no tracks. None.” 

Howard consulted numerous veterinarians during his two years of investigation. He says they were all as confused and astounded as he was. So were the law enforcement of neighboring counties, where cattle mutilations were also occurring. Eventually, Howard says sheriffs and police from throughout the area formed a task force that sought to explain the mutilations. According to a New York Times article on a new rash of cattle mutilations in the area in 2001, that task force force was based in the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office from 1974 to 1977, and it produced no tangible results. Instead of moving toward an explanation, the situation only became more strange.
“We were into the mutilations for two, three months, maybe longer,” Howard says, “and then we started getting reports of the UFOs.”
The reports, Howard says, came from “good, solid family people.” He and his deputies even gave some of them polygraphs during interviews about what had happened.
“We never, ever had any reason whatsoever to suspect anybody was lying to us,” Howard says. “They were just relating what they saw.”
Often, there were multiple, credible witnesses who all told identical and highly detailed accounts of seeing large, flying craft, often up-close and often for substantial periods of time. While Howard never saw one himself, he tried.
“I’ve chased them all over the country out here on other people’s word,” he says.
One night in the midst of the mutilations and the sightings, a friend came into the sheriff’s office and told Howard about a “really, really bright star” in the night sky. Howard went out and looked.
“And I thought, ‘Well, by golly, maybe,’” Howard says. “So I said, ‘You get in the car and hang on. I’ll do the drivin’, and you do the lookin’.”
Before he left his office, Howard asked an employee to call an Air Force colonel he knew and who also had an “intriguing interest” in UFOs. The colonel worked in a small Air Force outpost just north of Pendroy, a tiny unincorporated town near the northern edge of Teton County. The outpost, Howard says, was a station for monitoring planes conducting electronic bombing runs out of Great Falls’ Malmstrom Air Force Base, and the colonel had offered to try to detect UFO activity on radar.
While his office contacted the outpost and requested they keep an eye out for anything unusual, Howard and his friend pursued the light down a gravel road, east of Freezout Lake. “And the closer we got, the more realization we had that, ‘Hey, we’re looking at something that isn’t a star.’” Eventually, the object started to move. Howard, however, couldn’t get closer. He’d run out of road. Then the light went out.
“And that’s about the time they said, ‘Well, you should come to the tracking station [near Pendroy], we’ve got something we think you would find very interesting.’ So I did that very thing,” Howard says.
When he arrived at the collection of trailers that comprised the Air Force outpost, the colonel invited Howard inside.
“It looked like an oversized polygraph, if you will,” Howard says. “Big desk, couple guys sitting there and above the desk in a vertical plane is this paper that is making these recordations on it.” The paper showed the elevation, speed and other data about the object Howard had been chasing. It seemed to track the object as it drifted, then went “instantaneously straight up,” made “an instantaneous stop” and started “floating or drifting again.” “And [the colonel] looked at me,” Howard continues, “and said, ‘I know. I’ve been in the Air Force a while. We do not have any kind of a flying machine that can do that.’”
Minutes later, Howard says, a car pulled up and three or four men in black coveralls, carrying what looked like fishing-pole tubes, got out. They entered the tracking station, asked for the colonel and told him Howard had to leave immediately. Howard obeyed and waited outside. A few minutes later, the men emerged with their tubes and left.
“So the colonel apologized and said, ‘They have taken the paper tracing that we made of all this, and it’s gone. It’s now going to Malmstrom Air Force Base,’” Howard says.
According to Joan Bird, author of Montana UFOs and Extraterrestrials, Air Force officials have been confiscating evidence of UFO activity around Malmstrom since at least 1950. That was the year Nick Mariana made the first known film of UFOs ever recorded in the United States. He made it on Aug. 15, from the parking lot of Legion Ballpark, home of the Great Falls Electrics. Mariana was the minor league baseball team’s general manager and a graduate of the University of Montana School of Journalism.
Though only 15 seconds long, the clip offered a compelling new kind of evidence of UFO activity. It allowed those who had never seen a UFO in person to feel like they’d had a first-hand experience of doing so. It allowed others to see what Mariana saw: two discs in the sky above Great Falls, near the Anaconda Company smokestack that then was an Electric City landmark and has since been demolished.

“The discs,” Mariana later recounted in footage widely available online, “appeared to be spinning like a top, and were about 50 feet across and about 50 yards apart. I could not see any exhaust, wings or any kind of fuselage. There was no cabin, no odor, no sound, except I thought I heard a whooshing sounds when I saw them.”
Mariana shared what he’d seen with the Great Falls Leader, an afternoon paper. Then, on Oct. 4, 1950, an Air Force captain visited Mariana, listened to his account and took his film for analysis. After viewing Mariana’s footage, the Air Force issued a statement saying the film was “too dark to distinguish any objects” and gave Mariana his film. It was returned, however, in an altered state, with some 35 frames of tape spliced out of it, Mariana claimed.
“The missing footage showed the clearest views of the two spinning metal discs,” Bird writes.
Bird says this is but one example of a pervasive government and military campaign to conceal the truth about UFO activity not only in Montana but throughout the country. In Montana, much of that activity and much of that campaign has been focused on Malmstrom, where a portion of the nation’s nuclear arsenal is stored in underground silos.
On March 24, 1967, for example, Air Force Lt. Robert Salas was monitoring 10 nuclear missiles in a subterranean launch control capsule based out of Malmstrom when an airman on the ground reported that a UFO was hovering above the silo’s gate. Soon, a series of alarms went off. “Within minutes,” Bird writes, “all ten missiles … were shut down.”
The Air Force allegedly forbade Salas or anyone else from talking about the incident, and it remained secret for years. (A spokesman for Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Wing public affairs office declined to comment to the Indy on all reports regarding UFOs.) The connection between UFOs, extraterrestrial visitations, Malmstrom, nuclear missiles and the confiscation of evidence is not coincidental, according to Bird and others.
“I go back and read a lot of those early accounts [of abduction], because right after this planet developed nuclear weapons is when a lot of experiences and a lot of sightings started happening,” Bird says from the dining room table of her home in Helena. “And these early contactees said, ‘Yes, they’re here, because they’re very concerned about whether this planet’s going to make it or not. And they’re here to try to help us catch up our moral evolution with our technological evolution. That our moral evolution or spiritual evolution is lagging behind our technological evolution, and that there are no guarantees. A lot of planets haven’t made it through this particular passage in evolution, this particular point in their development.’”
O’Connor of the JAML also cites “these very well documented” extraterrestrial interventions in Montana’s missile cache when advocating for increased contact with alien civilizations. He believes if we interact with those from other worlds with the “proper degree of curiosity and perhaps even humility,” we can find practical means for repairing the damage we’ve done to the planet.
“I’ll give you one example of that,” he says, while reaching toward a shelf in the library for a copy of Paul Potter’s Gravitational Manipulation of Domed Craft: UFO Propulsion Dynamics.
Potter, O’Connor explains, shows in the book how the technology that propels flying saucers might be used to produce a safe and sufficient source of energy to meet all of our needs without harming our planet.
Joe Nickell has heard stories like these before. As a senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and an investigative writer for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, he spends his time researching claims of “historical, paranormal and forensic mysteries, myths and hoaxes.” Nickell, who is based in Amherst, N.Y., has studied everything from Bigfoot to the Shroud of Turin in search of logical explanations for the seemingly inexplicable—and he says he has found them.
As for those who claim extraterrestrials have visited Earth in space craft, Nickell is dismissive.
“What they’re doing is, they’re engaging in a logical fallacy called ‘an argument from ignorance,’” Nickell says. “And what it means is, you can’t draw a conclusion from ‘I don’t know.’ You can’t say, ‘Well, nobody can tell us what that bright zig-zagging light was, therefore, you see, it’s an extraterrestrial craft.’” 

The alleged evidence of an extraterrestrial presence, Nickell argues, can always be shown to derive from an earthly source. Just because the government changed its story about what happened at Roswell, that doesn’t prove a UFO crashed there. He points to the U.S. government’s admission in 1994 that, in fact, there was a cover-up of what really happened in 1947—but what was being concealed was not an alien craft but the crash of a top-secret, high-altitude balloon during a test flight for an atomic-detection program called Project Mogul.
The connection between cattle mutilations and UFOs, Nickell says, has also been explained. He says it’s animal predators, not aliens, that cause this unusual phenomenon.
“Sometimes we’re told that, ‘Oh, there were these circular, very precision cuts,’” Nickell says. “And they’re not precision cuts. What happened was the sharp little teeth of the little predator left a hole and then the animal began to decay, putrefy, and the gases caused the animal to bloat. And the bloating stretched that hole until it looked quite sharp and precise.”
The idea that extraterrestrials visit our planet is a “popular mythology for our time,” Nickell says.
“Here we are on this small, isolated planet in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “We used to have a world in which the world itself had vast wildernesses and so forth, and so our attention was to crossing the ocean and going to remote arctic areas and deep wildernesses and the depths of lakes and looking for Nessie and so forth. But increasingly, we’re finding this shrunken planet. … And we’ve begun to look out now from the planet. We’re looking to other worlds.”
As humans look, many continue to find signs of extraterrestrial life. According to a 2012 National Geographic poll, 36 percent of Americans—about 80 million people—believe UFOs exist. These believers see signs that humans are not alone, that there is more than just this small and shrinking earth—and it’s a tantalizing thought.

That thought may be rooted in hope, as Nickell suggests, but it’s also a product of what Bird, O’Connor and many others insist is solid evidence. They point to prehistoric paintings that depict what appear to be flying discs. They point to films and photographs that show all manner of strange spacecraft and inexplicable lights moving across the sky. They cite changes in the biophysical makeup of the plants and soil of crop circles. They point to the surgically removed implants found in abductees.
For them, it is not wishful thinking that has conjured up belief in extraterrestrial visitations. Rather, it is fear that has made humans unwilling to recognize the overwhelming evidence of UFOs and the presence of aliens.
“This stuff is all out there,” Bird says, “but there’s just a lot of resistance to the topic because, as Mack [the Harvard psychiatrist] says so beautifully, it threatens our nature of reality.”
Judge Howard says he is unable to make any definitive claims about what happened in Teton County in the 1970s, but absent any earthly explanation, he’s willing to look elsewhere.
“In court, it’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” he says. “We don’t have that. But neither do we have any proof that would dispel what these people are saying.”
Without such proof, all Howard can do is wait for a sign, for confirmation, for a UFO to show itself to him and offer up some answers.
“I would love to see one,” he says. “And if I ever do and it’s close enough, I’m going to see if I can hitch a ride.”