Distinctly Montana Magazine

29 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m Which is WOrse? Californians or OLD BROKE RANCHER BY GARY SHELTON I F YOU'RE READING THIS, THE ALIENS PROBABLY HAVEN'T IN- VADED YET. And if they have, then what on earth are you doing leafing through a magazine? You should be using it for toilet pa- per, which is now worth its weight in irradiated platinum! I've been a crackpot for nigh on 60 years, ever since I saw The Twi- light Zone on the tube and wondered where all the aliens were at. Since then, I've followed the UFO (ahem, excuse me, UAP) lore pretty closely, reading Philip Corso's The Day After Roswell, skeptically but hopefully pouring over Bob Lazar's supposed accounts of working at Area 51, and even dutifully experiencing my own sighting of an un- explained craft. In the decades since, I've bored my family and friends endlessly by retelling it, so why should you be any different? One night while I was engineering for the Burlington-Northern be- tween Custer and Hysham in the late 1970s, one of the other crewmen shouted "What the hell is that?" He noticed, and I did shortly after, that the train was bathed in a strange light which seemed to be emit- ting from the bottom of an enormous craft that looked to be about two football fields long and one wide. It followed us through the breaks and bluffs of Yellowstone River before shooting vertically into the sky at an impossible speed. Even though I've told this story over and over, I still feel a little bash- ful recounting it because for years that sort of thing was all flying sau- cers and little green men, and it seemed as if the kinds of people who saw stuff like that were often gap-toothed, red-necked hillbillies— people, in short, who were just like me. In other words, I don't blame people who didn't believe me. I'm sure that if I saw myself (on the His- tory Channel, let's say) adjusting my sweat-stained John Deere cap while I talked about giant spaceships, I wouldn't believe myself either. Nevertheless, it hasn't escaped my notice that there's been a lot of UFO news (whoops, I mean UAP news! Fifty-some years of habit is hard to break) lately, including our shooting down of a Chinese bal- loon and several objects that apparently weren't Chinese or balloons, a very high-profile whistleblower, a House of Representatives hear- ing, and hours of closed-door testimony. I'm writing this in early Au- gust, and there may have been yet stranger developments since. In all my years of being a crackpot, I've never seen so much happen at once. And then Congress advanced several laws intending to declassi- fy UFO documents or exercise eminent domain over recovered UFOs and their passengers. Politicians on both sides of the aisle supported the bills. Who's ever seen Congress work so harmoniously and expe- diently? So it's got me thinking, what if they're coming, whoever they are, and the government knows it and is trying to get ahead of the story? And if they are coming, then you know where they're coming. The same place as all the rest of the tourists: Montana. Which means we finally have to face some paradigm-altering ideas, such as, Is there anyone in the universe that could possibly be worse than Californians? Now, to be fair, I don't hate Californians at all, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that Montana has spent the last 50+ years exhausting itself in loathing California. Some of us think they're com- aliens from outer space ?

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