Incident at Pot Mountain
An alien visitation? A glimpse of the denizens of another dimension? Or was it an encounter with elusive time travelers from the future…?
When a man—puny, insignificant, of no real consequence in a vast and bewildering universe—comes across a rent in that Veil of Reality that typically coddles him in comforting mundanity and staidness, the result is almost always the same: confusion, an unshakeable sense of the uncanny…maybe even a creeping sensation of fear, panic, or terror.
This, my friends, is what happens when a lone and pitiable man encounters the Unknown. At least that’s what I call it. Hell, call it whatever you want: call it High Strangeness, call it Intimations of the Outside. The name doesn’t matter; what matters is that an encounter of this kind is liable to leave a deep impression, for it is not something that is easily forgotten. You could say it’s the sort of thing that’s life changing—as it so often is, altering the trajectory of a man’s life in ways he’d never have imagined.
That is the sort of experience that was had by two bowhunters in later summer of 2019. Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero had an inexplicable brush with High Strangeness, and it’s likely to have left an indelible mark on their lives. God knows they’ve tried hard enough to describe their experience, and explain it in exacting detail to those who are still comfortably swaddled in the aforementioned Veil of Reality that dissevers the Known from the Unknown; but that’s a damned difficult thing to do, because words and pictures and descriptions just fail so utterly when trying to communicate this sort of thing.
Even so, they’ve done their level best—as every experiencer of High Strangeness must—and their encounter forms the subject of this week’s issue: the “Incident at Pot Mountain.”
The Incident occurred around Labor Day, 2019, and the setting was one of the most rugged and naturally beautiful areas of the rugged and naturally beautiful state of New Mexico.
I’ve talked often enough about the San Luis Valley in this newsletter, so I won’t say much more about it here—save that it’s one of the most active UFO, cryptozoological, and just plain High Strangeness hotspots in the country, if not the entire world. The area in question for the Incident might not be technically considered the San Luis Valley—which is commonly understood to be restricted to the state of Colorado—but in actual fact it very much is a part of that Valley, whose southernmost end extends into northern New Mexico and encompasses the spectacular country around the famous artist’s retreat and ski resort of Taos.
Now if you’ve been to Taos, you know just how wild the scenery can be. To the east are the imposing peaks of the Taos Mountains, part of the Sangre de Cristo range, which rear up a good six thousand feet above the surrounding landscape and include Wheeler Peak—at 13,167 feet the highest in New Mexico. To the west…well, that’s where things get really interesting. For this is the gorgeous Taos Plateau, which is riven right down its middle by the breathtaking Taos Gorge, an immense chasm carved out of the plateau’s volcanic rock by the relentless course of the mighty Rio Grande. You might even recognize this Gorge from a movie or two, and especially the great bridge that stands athwart it and which attracts thousands of visitors each year for the simple thrill of taking a stroll across the giddy gulf.
On the west side of this prodigious Gorge is a series of low, dome-shaped mountains, the largest of which is San Antonio Mountain, which rises like a gargantuan ant-mound way up near the Colorado border. In fact, along with the much smaller Ute Mountain—the easternmost of these eminences—San Antonio Mountain acts somewhat like a gatepost, announcing one’s imminent passage into the Colorado portion of the San Luis Valley.
These mountains are all shield volcanoes, great lava domes formed during a period of extensive eruptions in the Rio Grande rift valley around three million years ago. Among the other extinct volcanoes on the plateau are the aforesaid Ute Mountain, two smaller domes called Cerro del Aire and Cerro Montoso, and a final one called Cerro de la Olla, which looks just like it could be San Antonio Mountain’s little brother.
Cerro de la Olla is sometimes also known as “Pot Mountain,” and it is the scene of our story.
On Labor Day Weekend of 2019, Santa Fe County residents and experienced bowhunters Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero decided to spend some time among the dead volcanoes of northern New Mexico hunting elk and enjoying the outdoors.
They didn’t find any elk—but something strange and inexplicable found them.
The two hunters arrived in the vicinity of Pot Mountain several days before the beginning of hunting season to scout for signs of elk. On the morning of Sunday, September 1—the opening of the season—the two arose early in the morning and took up a position on either side of a field near the mountain to await their prey.
By 9:30 in the morning, however, and with no elk in sight, Brinkley decided he’d waited enough, and resolved to explore the woods and seek his prey if none would come to him. Turns out he got much more than he bargained for.
He climbed to the top of Pot Mountain—and, as I can attest, these mountains aren’t terribly difficult to climb, since they have such a low, rounded, hill-like profile—and came upon the volcano’s shallow caldera. Brinkley decided to walk to the caldera’s southwestern edge, still seeking his elk.
And that’s when he had his encounter.
The Taos News describes what Brinkley saw:
“As he walked to the edge he noticed two figures on his side of the caldera. He thought at first they were hunters. But, they were ‘very tall shapes of these beings, standing side by side, staring right at me,’ he said.
He walked toward them across the brushy field. He estimates they were about 35 yards away. As a bow hunter, where measuring distance is critical to hitting a target, he said he’s pretty adept at it. He went around the bush and looked again. The figures were gone.
He looked around and didn't see them. ‘Figured I would talk to them. They were gone, just gone,’ Brinkley said.
He thought more about what he had seen: With their lower half concealed by bushes in the caldera, he had only seen them from the waist up. ‘The shape that would be like their heads, it looked like they had huge hoods on. It looked like two ribbons coming off either side to a point at the top and bottom (like a banana). The right side was black, left side was white and a little shiny. Torsos were kind of black, I couldn’t see many details. It definitely looked like clothes. In [the] middle of the oval was just gray.’
He thought maybe it was the back of hunters’ heads. ‘But it looked too strange, too crazy.’”
Understandably, Brinkley was “a little weirded out” by the experience. Such is commonly the lot of those who have truck, unexpected or otherwise, with High Strangeness.
Brinkley went back to find his friend, who was still waiting fruitlessly to bag some elk. At first, he told Lucero that he’d seen a couple of hunters who more than likely were responsible for spooking any elk that were in the area. But as the strangeness of his encounter revolved in his mind, he realized that the elk were probably spooked by something much less mundane than mere human hunters—in fact, they’d probably been spooked by the same thing that spooked him.
Finally, Brinkley broke down and told Lucero about his encounter. Lucero, for his part, conceded that his friend was acting strangely—for one thing, Brinkley had come tromping up to Lucero’s blind with all the subtlety of an elephant, something that was distinctly out of character—and Lucero himself began to feel “weirded out,” at second hand, just by hearing his friend’s story.
In any case, the two shrugged off the encounter as bizarre but perhaps prosaically explicable in some way that eluded them, and called it a day, with no elk in sight. The following day, Labor Day, they returned to the same area, determined to give a better account of themselves.
No such luck.
By 2:30 in the afternoon, it was plainly obvious that something had affrighted whatever elk might have been in the area, for there were none to be found. So the two bowhunters climbed into their Jeep and decided to drive to the other side of Pot Mountain, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of the missing elk, and search for signs of ATV tracks or other hunters.
There were neither any signs of hunters and Labor Day joyriders, nor of any wildlife at all. The mystery deepened, and Brinkley and Lucero grew only more bewildered. Then, as they rounded the mountain, they saw…something.
“They both work with movie sets. At first they thought it was a movie base camp. ‘It’s this big tent structure, like a circus tent, 50-60 feet tall. Coming off the left of it was this long building, almost like what you would build for an archery lane for target practice. It was a third the height, but really long, maybe a couple hundred feet.’
They were about a quarter mile away and couldn’t see the bottom of the structure.
They watched it for about a minute as they drove.
‘What is it,’ he asked Lucero, ‘a base camp for a movie? Or are they building an alien ship set?’
They drove down a little hill, lost sight of the structure for at most five seconds, Brinkley said.
‘When we topped the hill, it was gone. Just gone.’
Lucero said he was watching it the whole time while Brinkley drove except for those few seconds. ‘There was no dust, there was nothing,’ Lucero said.
They drove around the area searching for what they had seen until dark.
Nothing.
‘I just know it was real,’ Brinkley said. ‘It was huge and white and then gone.’”
And that was it. That was Brinkley and Lucero’s brush with High Strangeness, which they are not likely to forget anytime soon. That’s the way it is with these experiences—they tend to brand one for life.
After coming into Taos, the two hunters felt compelled to tell their story to someone, anyone—even at the risk of sounding like two stereotypical UFO nuts. But they swore they had no interest in the topic, nor even believed in UFOs.
“We’re a couple of guys that don’t believe in much, but we believe now,” Brinkley told the Taos News. And that’s the way it so often is with these encounters; two men—down to earth, hard-bitten, not exactly prone to fantasy—have a run-in with the uncanny, and their lives are never the same.
Are they true believers now? You better believe it.
Verdict: So what the hell was it that happened to Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero on that unforgettable Labor Day weekend in 2019?
Well, that’s always the hardest part—quantifying the manifestly unquantifiable. The easiest explanation, and the one that most will undoubtedly reach for, is that these two bowhunters encountered a UFO and its occupants.
In that case, the Incident at Pot Mountain began with a Close Encounter of the Third Kind experienced by Josh Brinkley, followed by a Close Encounter of the First Kind experienced by both of the hunters. And that, it seems to me, makes this Incident rather unique, in that the order of encounters is usually the other way around.
Now what can we say about UFO sightings and encounters in the area around Taos, New Mexico? The truth is, it should probably come as no surprise—particularly for a section of the San Luis Valley—that this region and adjacent areas are host to numerous UFO sightings.
For one thing, the now-defunct Alliance Studying Paranormal Experiences claimed to have found evidence twelve years ago of a genuine UFO “landing” near Angel Fire, which is located in the beautiful Moreno Valley amidst the Taos Mountains, not terribly far east of the scene of the Incident. And as long ago as 1966, a group of Boy Scouts visiting the Philmont Scout Ranch—located near Cimarron, on the eastern side of the mountains across from Taos—witnessed a peculiar UAP on the Fourth of July, no less.
And these are but a handful of the many inexplicable aerial sightings near Taos, some of which I’ll perhaps examine in greater detail in future issues of this newsletter.
But for some reason—call it a paranormalist’s intuition—the UFO explanation for the Incident at Pot Mountain doesn’t seem to quite pass muster with me. Doesn’t mean I can venture an explanation that does; no sir, I’m as much in the dark as poor Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero.
It’s just that there’s something damned fragmentary and almost dream-like about these two men’s encounter. It’s High Strangeness at its very strangest—no doubt about that. But just consider these facts: Brinkley witnesses two weird figures, humanoid perhaps but unnaturally tall, with a peculiar apparatus or headgear, and so strange seeming as to baffle and confuse the startled hunter. At first he thinks they’re hunters; on second thought, he’s not so sure.
Then they just…disappear. The whole thing spooks Brinkley, understandably, and he returns posthaste to his friend to spill out his inexplicable tale. And maybe, also, for the much-needed comfort of just being around another human being at that particular moment.
What were these entities? Why were they atop a volcanic mountain in northern New Mexico on a summer’s morning? Why were they glimpsed, briefly, and then vanished, as if they were never there? Were they human at all, given their uncanny height and raiment, to say nothing of their penchant for disappearing; and if not, then…what were they?
Then there’s the object, seen by both men the next day. Did the beings return? Was that their “craft,” and if so, why did it resemble a kind of tent—the sort of thing the two men were familiar with from their jobs in the movie industry? And again, there’s another mysterious vanishment; after the Jeep passes into a hollow in the topography, the object is lost sight of, and when they top the hill after a mere few seconds it’s gone as if it never was.
And don’t get me started on the eerie silence in the wilderness, and the lack of wildlife. That’s just plain creepy, full stop.
No, it seems to me there’s something more to this story than just another UFO encounter. It’s almost as if Brinkley and Lucero were permitted—for whatever reason—a glimpse of another reality, another dimension, perhaps even another time. It’s almost as if the world of the two bowhunters—our world—and the world of these other beings slipped out of phase somehow, and each got their circuits crossed in some unexplainable fashion.
Something was on that mountain, dressed in a peculiar fashion; and the two men saw some strange object, perhaps a vehicle of some sort, or maybe a more permanent structure of some unknowable kind. The description of the tent-like thing almost seems redolent of the famous “Earthships” located not far away on the Taos Plateau. Perhaps Brinkley and Lucero experienced a transitory timeslip, or a rent or rift in time, which allowed them to glimpse some of the future residents of the Taos Plateau…including one of their dwellings—the direct evolutionary descendant of the type found in the area in the present day—and perhaps two hunters atop the mountain dressed in the strange garb of that far-off age?
Or maybe the two men experienced a kind of dimensional slippage, which permitted them to see—however briefly—the denizens of a parallel universe? Perhaps those weirdly tall beings are what pass for humans on that alternate earth; maybe they were “scientists” or explorers of some kind, and the tent object was their laboratory, wherein they conduct research and experiments into bridging the gulf between our universes?
Hell, intelligent agency needn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. Maybe the slippage was entirely fortuitous and accidental; maybe there is some curious, but quite natural, electromagnetic or—who knows?—spiritual property inherent in the volcanic rocks of the Taos Plateau. Is it so inconceivable that sometimes, when the conditions are just right, a portal to another world or another time opens up? Maybe the elk and other wildlife of Pot Mountain are well aware of this phenomenon, and maybe that’s why they made themselves scarce on that memorable Labor Day weekend in 2019.
As a personal aside, I can attest that there was a great deal of storm activity in that area on that very weekend, since on the two days in question my brother and I passed near Pot Mountain on our way to and back from climbing Mt. Shavano in Colorado. In fact, we encountered a large electrical storm while passing near the mountain on the afternoon of September 1, not many hours after Brinkley’s encounter with the two mysterious figures, and I vividly remember a tremendous lighting bolt striking in the area near Pot Mountain as we passed it on the highway.
The following afternoon—again, not many hours after the transient apparition of the “tent-object”—we passed the mountain once more, and there was again a great deal of storm activity in the area.
Is there a connection? Probably not. But I can’t help but wonder if maybe all that electrical activity—since violent thunderstorms are a daily occurrence in that area at that time of year—interacts with the magnetic and lava rocks of those mountains and that plateau, and strikes up some sort of resonance or other phenomenon, of the kind that could break or sunder the barriers between our dimension or time and another.
Who knows? My mind wanders, and likely enough my theories are laughable. But I’ll close with this thought—if these theories are true, might it not be worth someone’s while to keep a close watch on Pot Mountain, in case the slippage happens again, and the weird tall beings and their tent-like home/spaceship/time machine reappear?
Come to think of it, that might be a job I’ll just have to take on myself…
Excellent account of a highly strange encounter. We love the firsthand insights about the local area. Great report. 👍