On October 13, Kenny Collins and I walked into a barbershop in downtown Estes Park with an EMF meter, a spirit box, a thermal camera and a laser grid. It was cold, misty and raining. It was also my first real ghost hunt.

Kenny has done more of these than he can count. He’s investigated the Elkhorn Lodge and the old movie theater here, and there’s a whole…

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If you’ve watched our second Campfire Story, you already know the legend. A prospector high above Fall River cracks open crystals deep inside his mine and lets something out. On cloudy nights a glowing blue mist drifts down through the trees. In the morning there are three-toed claw marks on the spruce and dead animals around the cabin. In the end, the …

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When I wrote here last, The Colorado X-Files was one episode old. I promised a longform companion piece after every episode, and then the show ran faster than my typing could keep up with. So consider this me catching you up, all at once, and making good on that promise going forward.

Here’s the short version. In about a month, we’ve put out three more full-length pieces, a run of breaking-news shorts, a brand-new illustrated series of Colorado campfire stories, a field report from a Colorado MUFON meeting, and our first-ever merch shop. Some of it was planned. Some of it happened because a good story walked up and we couldn’t help ourselves.

The full-length episodes

Chuck Zukowski, uncut. Our conversation with Chuck for episode one ran long, and most of it never made the final cut. So we released the whole interview on its own: What Are They Doing With ALL the Blood and Organs? Chuck Zukowski on Cattle Mutilation. If you read my last piece and wanted more of the engineer who got let go as a reserve deputy for disagreeing with his own department about a dead horse, this is an hour of him, in his own words.

Can a $500 backyard radar catch a UFO? For episode 1.5, I sat down with David Dominguez Hooper, a UC Berkeley–trained engineer who worked on autonomous drones and LiDAR before founding ELDÆON. His company builds passive radar sensors, and his plan is a citizen detection network: ordinary people watching their own skies, instead of waiting for the government to tell us what’s up there. It’s the most hopeful idea I’ve run into in this whole field, and it’s the kind of thing I want this show to keep looking for. Can This $500 Device Detect UFOs?

Where Kenny saw Bigfoot. This is the one I’d been waiting to film. Kenny started hunting Sasquatch as a 14-year-old in Nebraska after seeing The Legend of Boggy Creek. On January 7, 2013, on a snowy morning in the hills above the Big Thompson River, about five miles outside Estes Park, he says he found himself staring at one behind a rock. He also says he felt it telling him to go away, and he went. We walked the site together, and he tells the whole story, including why he left. I also told a couple of my own stories on camera for the first time: two silent black triangles I saw as an EMT in Montana, and a night of lights over my family’s home near Glacier. Bigfoot Kenny Takes Us to Where He First Saw Sasquatch

Breaking news, in under a minute

When the government releases UAP files now, it does it in batches, and Colorado keeps turning up in them. So we started a run of short videos that get the Colorado angle to you fast. The first covered Colorado’s appearance in the sixth UAP document drop.

Then came a two-parter on black triangles. Part one walks through FBI files on two black triangles reported over Colorado Springs. Part two is personal: I’ve seen one. I tell the story of the two silent black triangles with red lights I watched around 3:30 in the morning near Dickey Lake, Montana, while I was working as an EMT, with my EMS manager right beside me.

The shorts live on the channel’s Shorts tab, and they’re the fastest way to keep up between full episodes.

Campfire Stories: a new illustrated series

This is the project I’m proudest of this month. Campfire Stories is a series of short animated films in a field-sketchbook style, each one a strange true story told the way you’d tell it around a fire. I narrate and report every one; the illustration is built with AI tools, and every script is checked against the record the same way I’d check an article. And like everything else on the show, each one separates what’s documented from what’s just a good story.

#1: He Testified to Congress. Now He Says Reptilians. In 2023, decorated Air Force intelligence veteran David Grusch told Congress under oath that the U.S. has been hiding crashed non-human craft. On Joe Rogan’s show this fall, he relayed a colleague’s account of American troops meeting survivors of a crash. Grusch says he never saw it himself and has shown no evidence, and the Pentagon’s UAP office says it has found nothing. We tell you exactly that.

#2: The Blue Mist of Estes Park. In the early 1900s, a prospector named William “Miner Bill” Currence worked a claim high on Mount Chapin, in what’s now Rocky Mountain National Park, and swore he’d released a glowing blue mist from crystals deep in his mine. The legend says it left three-toed tracks and came for him. The paper trail tells a different story, and it’s sitting in the Park Service’s mining history and the Estes Park Museum’s records.

#3: The Airport Statue That Killed Its Creator. A 32-foot blue mustang with glowing red eyes rears over Peña Boulevard outside Denver International Airport. In 2006, a section of it broke loose and killed the sculptor who made it, Luis Jiménez. Travelers call it Blucifer.

More are coming all through October. If you’ve got a Colorado story that belongs around the fire, send it my way.

Joining Colorado MUFON, and a scientist with a big claim

I’ve joined Colorado MUFON, the state chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, which meets monthly in Centennial. On October 10, I went to hear Dr. Jim Segala, a physicist who spent years as chief scientist on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. His claim: close encounters with the phenomenon leave marks on the human body, and he says he has the data.

He presented his experiencer study, the skin and hearing effects people report, and a 2010 Defense Intelligence Agency reference document, released through FOIA, that describes burns and neurological effects he says match what his participants report. He also showed sensor data from contact sessions, including one in Bailey, Colorado.

The next evening I walked the Lake Estes path and recorded my honest take, as someone who’s had his own experiences. Some of it lined up with things I’ve felt myself. Some of it felt more like a pitch for his app and sensor boxes than a deep dive into the data. His work hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, and I say so. Skinwalker Ranch Scientist Says UFO Encounters Leave Marks on the Body

Thank you to Colorado MUFON for letting us use clips from their livestream of the talk.

The Colorado X-Files shop is open

We opened a shop, and I’ll be honest about why. Making this show costs real money, and I’d rather it be paid for by people who love these stories than by anyone with an agenda. Every purchase goes straight back into the investigations.

The designs come straight out of the stories. The Blue Mist of Estes Park, with the miner’s cabin from our Campfire Story. Blucifer, Denver’s demon horse. A Sasquatch Research Unit design for Kenny’s corner of the Big Thompson. They’re on tees, heavyweight hoodies, mugs, tumblers, bottles, hats and a CX beanie, all done in a vintage park-service look, because that’s what Colorado feels like to me.

And then there are the coasters. I engrave every slate coaster myself, by laser, in my basement workshop here in Estes Park. There’s a UFO design and a Sasquatch design, both carrying the line that’s become our motto: I Believe. It’s the other side of the coin from “I Want to Believe,” and I think it says something about how far this community has come since The X-Files first aired.

Shop The Colorado X-Files

What’s next

This week Kenny and I go back out to film the second half of our Sugar Shack episode: the actual ghost hunt. The Sugar Shack is a historic building here in Estes Park, home to a candy shop and a barbershop called the Vortex. I think it’s one of the most haunted places in one of the most haunted mountain towns in America, and hardly anyone knows about it. After that comes our Halloween special.

And I’m recommitting to the promise I made in my last piece: a longform companion article here for every full episode, going deeper than the video can. You’ll get the next one without the month-long wait.

If you’ve seen something strange in Colorado, or you know a story we should be chasing, the tip line is open: coloradoxfiles@gmail.com.

If you’ve enjoyed any of this, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the channel, like what you watch, and share it with someone who’d love it. For a small independent show, that’s what keeps the lights on, and the flashlights off.

Subscribe to The Colorado X-Files on YouTube

The Colorado X-Files: Why I’m Done Writing About What Divides Us

In September of 1967, on a ranch outside Alamosa, a three-year-old Appaloosa was found dead in a field. She’d been stripped to the bone from the neck up — no blood on the ground, no tracks leading in or out. The papers called her Snippy. Her real name was Lady, and nearly sixty years later, nobody has ever explained what happened to her.

I want to tell you about Lady, and about a goat on a hillside outside Glen Haven, and about a man who’s spent thirty years chasing this exact kind of impossible. But first I have to tell you something true about myself, because it’s the whole reason this project exists.

Not new, but truer than ever

I’ve told you before, so this isn’t a new confession: I don’t write about politics anymore. I’ve spent years writing about the things that are tearing this country apart — the daily grind of who’s right and who’s the enemy this week — with bylines in Salon, Newsweek, Westword, good outlets all. Somewhere in the last couple of years I burned out on that kind of writing in a way I don’t think I can fully come back from, and like a lot of freelancers right now, I watched the budgets for that kind of work shrink across the board too — Westword included, after their freelance budget got slashed this past year. Between the two, stepping away wasn’t a hard call.

What I haven’t said as plainly before is why I’m finally willing to point my energy at the stuff I used to be embarrassed to admit I loved. For as long as journalism has existed, writing seriously about UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts — any of it — has been something close to a career killer. Editors stop taking you seriously. Sources start talking to you differently. You get quietly filed under “the guy who believes in aliens,” and it follows you. I knew that risk for a long time, and it’s a big part of why I kept these topics at arm’s length even after I’d burned out on politics — filed under crazy conspiracy, not real journalism, same as everybody else filed them.

That’s changed, and not because I had some personal revelation. It changed because the evidence did. We’ve had actual document dumps out of the current administration, including material released out of the Department of War on UAP programs. We’ve had congressional hearings, on the record, with sworn testimony about unidentified aerial phenomena. We’ve had legitimate scientists and research institutions publishing findings that don’t fit neatly into “swamp gas” or “weather balloon” anymore. Whatever you make of any single case, the subject itself has been dragged out of the tinfoil-hat corner and onto the floor of Congress. So I went back and took a second look at a whole category of stories I’d always loved and always dismissed. Turns out maybe I was wrong to dismiss them.

And honestly — who doesn’t like a good UFO story, a good Bigfoot story, a good ghost story? That’s not a fringe question anymore. It might turn out to be a true one, too.

None of that changes the rule I set for myself: I’m still not writing about politics, not here, not under the Colorado Switchblade banner. What’s changed is what I get to write about instead — stories that don’t care what you voted for. Nobody has ever asked me about my politics before asking whether I believe in Bigfoot. Nobody picks a side on whether a rancher outside Trinidad really did find his cattle drained of blood with surgical precision and not a print in the mud around them. That question belongs to everybody. It’s one of the last genuinely shared mysteries we have left, and I think we need that more than we need one more hot take.

That’s the whole premise behind The Colorado X-Files, the video podcast I’ve just launched with my co-host, Kenny Collins — a strange-stories-of-Colorado show built on actual journalistic standards. We tell you what’s documented, what’s disputed, and what’s just a good story, and we let you make up your own mind. No team jerseys required.

Kenny, and how this started

Kenny’s been a working investigator out of the Estes Park area since 2007, with his first documented sighting making the local paper back in 2013. In the years since, he’s built the kind of hands-on field reputation you can’t fake — the guy ranchers and hikers actually call when something’s happened on their land. I brought the research and the writing background; Kenny brought boots that have actually been on the ground. Between us, we landed on a format: find a local story, dig into the history and research behind it the way I’d dig into any other investigative piece, get out on site ourselves whenever we can, and then bring in a real outside expert to stress-test everything we think we’ve found.

Episode one runs that whole loop on a single, very old Colorado question: what is doing this to our cattle?

A history that still doesn’t add up

Snippy is generally treated as the first modern American mutilation case on record — genuinely well-documented as a media event, whatever you make of the underlying cause. But it was the 1970s that turned this into a specifically Colorado story. Between April and October of 1975 alone, nearly 200 mutilation cases were reported statewide — enough that the AP named it Colorado’s number one news story of the year.

The federal government actually looked into it. Between 1979 and 1980, retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel led “Operation Animal Mutilation” out of the First Judicial District Attorney’s office in Santa Fe, on a roughly $45,000–$50,000 law enforcement grant. He examined about two dozen fresh cases and concluded it was predator and scavenger activity on animals that had already died natural deaths — the “surgical” look being scavengers opening the softest tissue first.

Not everyone was satisfied. Linda Moulton Howe’s 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest, which won an Emmy for Denver’s KMGH, argued Rommel had leaned on too few cases, mostly stale ones, and had waved off veterinary findings that pointed to sharp-instrument cuts. Her film is a Colorado media artifact in its own right at this point — arguably the thing that permanently welded cattle mutilation to the UFO hypothesis in the public mind.

The cases since then read like a pattern that refuses to close. In Costilla County in 2009, rancher Manuel Sanchez found four cows dead on his land near the New Mexico line — skinned back, organs cleared, one missing its tongue, no footprints or predator sign anywhere near them. He sold off the rest of his herd out of fear not long after. Up near Trinidad, Mike Duran has documented mutilations on his own property more than once, years apart — the kind of repeat-victim pattern investigators keep running into, where one ranch gets hit again and again while the neighbors are untouched. Researcher Chris O’Brien logged a 1998 case where a young cow was missing its entire right front leg, its spine pulled from neck to hip, its brain gone with no break in the skull at all.

And then there’s the one that still doesn’t fit anywhere. On October 21, 1975, inside the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs — fenced, staffed, practically in the shadow of NORAD’s underground command center — a 1,500-pound buffalo was found mutilated inside its own enclosure. An ear and the udder gone, roughly four square feet of hide removed, cuts precise enough that the zoo director called it “an expert job,” a read the county coroner backed up. No arrest. No public follow-up we could ever find. Just a director’s statement, a coroner’s report, and fifty years of nothing.

Three theories have circulated since the ‘70s to explain all of it: predators and decomposition, which was Rommel’s official position; a cult or satanic-ritual theory that dominated an actual 1975 Colorado law enforcement conference in Fort Collins despite producing zero arrests or physical evidence in fifty years; and a government-helicopter theory, anchored largely by former New Mexico State Police officer Gabe Valdez, who came to believe the U.S. government was responsible after investigating cases near Dulce involving clamp marks, gas-mask residue, and alleged tracking devices.

Standing where it happened

Here’s where I stop being able to write this like a normal reporter, because I wasn’t standing outside the story anymore. I was on the hillside.

Eight years ago, Kenny got called out to a property near Glen Haven for what started as a Bigfoot investigation — the landowner, Randy, believed something was crossing his land off Crow Mountain, and within an hour of Kenny showing up, a total stranger on the road independently told him he’d just seen the same thing on the same hillside. That relationship eventually led to a different kind of call: two of Randy’s goats had gone missing. Kenny found the first one nearby, killed clean by a mountain lion, teeth marks and all. The second one was almost a football field further up the slope, and it wasn’t a mountain lion kill.

We hiked back into that exact spot together for the episode. My drone was up, circling the ridgeline while I tried not to think too hard about how quiet it was. Kenny walked it from memory and his own case photos, pointing at bare ground like the goat was still lying there: neck broken and posed at a strange angle, one eye out, the anal area cut clean rather than torn open the way a scavenger tears, a mark on the rump like something had gripped it. No drag marks anywhere leading in or out. I kept looking for the thing that would make it make sense — a den, a trail, anything — and there was nothing. Kenny’s read, then and now, is that the animal was placed there. Not walked in. Placed.

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. Kenny had brought Missing 411 investigator David Paulides out to look at that same goat back when it happened, and Paulides — a guy who does not, by Kenny’s account, throw this kind of thing around lightly — told him flatly it looked like alien activity to him. I stood on that hillside with a drone in the air and a friend who’d seen this exact scene once before telling me the same story he told an actual missing-persons investigator eight years ago, and I understood, for the first time, why Kenny’s spent almost twenty years doing this. It’s not because he has an answer. It’s because the question won’t let him go.

Chuck Zukowski, and the numbers that don’t add up

For our outside expert, we sat down with Chuck Zukowski, who’s widely considered one of the top cattle mutilation investigators still active today. His day job for thirty years was as an IC mask design engineer — chip and optics work that ranged from traffic-light components to spy satellites — and it matters, because he doesn’t investigate like a believer. He investigates like an engineer who happens to keep running into things he can’t explain. He also spent eight years as a volunteer reserve deputy for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, until 2011, when he was let go specifically over his mutilation and UFO investigations after publicly disagreeing with the department’s own conclusions on a horse case. His research into geographic clustering along the 37th latitude — running through southern Colorado and northern New Mexico — became the basis for Ben Mezrich’s 2016 book The 37th Parallel and the Travel Channel series it spun off.

Chuck walked us through what actually convinced him this wasn’t predation: cases like Mike Duran’s, where a beloved 20-year-old pet cow was found within a 24-hour window showing no sign of struggle whatsoever — as if it had simply been set down rather than killed where it lay. He’s taken tissue samples from multiple cases to the Colorado State University veterinary lab in Fort Collins, and the pattern that keeps repeating is no hemorrhaging at the incision site — meaning the cuts happened after death — paired with hearts that had visibly collapsed, consistent, in his read, with the animal being drained of blood before it was ever cut open. He’s measured elevated EMF at scene after scene, in one case months after the fact, and has a working theory connecting UFO activity to water sources and aquifers, hydrogen propulsion, and what he describes as spherical “probe” objects that behave like autonomous drones.

He was careful, throughout, to separate what he can actually document from what he can only theorize — on the record, a vet will confirm what’s missing from a carcass; off the record is where you hear they’ve genuinely never seen anything like it in their career. And when I asked what he tells a rancher who just found this on their land and is terrified for their family, his answer was the same thing every time: in all his years doing this, he has never once heard of a rancher or their family being physically harmed by whatever’s responsible.

Why this, and why now

We closed the episode without an answer, because we don’t have one. What we have is a real, physical case eight miles from where I live, a documented history going back to 1967, and one of the most experienced investigators in the country telling us the blood loss alone doesn’t add up to anything he can explain through ordinary predation. Something is happening here on what looks to me like an industrial scale, and whoever or whatever is responsible has been getting away with it for close to sixty years.

But honestly, the mystery isn’t even the whole point for me anymore. I’ve written a lot of pieces designed to make people angry at each other. This is the first thing I’ve written in a long time designed to make people curious together instead. A rancher, a Bigfoot researcher, an engineer-turned-UFO-investigator, and a journalist who’s a little burned out on the news — none of us agree on much of anything except that something strange happened on that hillside, and we all want to know what. That’s rarer than it should be right now, and I intend to spend a lot more of my time on it going forward.

We haven’t landed on episode two yet — it might be UFOs, it might be shadow people, it might be Bigfoot — but it’ll have a Colorado angle, and it’ll be reported the same honest way this one was. And it’ll get the same treatment this piece just did: after every episode, look for a longform companion article right here on Colorado Switchblade, going deeper into the research and reporting than the video ever could.

If you’ve seen something strange happening in Colorado, or you know a story we should be looking into, our tip line is open: coloradoxfiles@gmail.com. And thank you to Driftwood Piercing Studio in Estes Park for letting us use their space to film.

The Colorado X-Files, Episode 1: “The Kill Site,” is available now. View it below. Please Subscribe, Like and Share!

I was ten years old the first time someone handed me a set of polyhedral dice in a basement in Fort Collins.

I didn’t know what I was walking into. I just knew the room felt different from everywhere else I’d b…

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I was born the year Firefall formed, and I wouldn’t move to Colorado for another decade. But some of my earliest memories are of riding through the woode…

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One of the strange gifts of spending your life around artists is that you eventually learn to recognize the moment when you’ve stumbled across a kindred creative mind.

It usually happens quickly. A certain way someone talks about the work. The influences they mention. The strange paths they took to get there.

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By Jason Van Tatenhove
Colorado Switchblade

I’ve always thought Everclear songs read like short stories that just happen to come with distortion pedals.

You don’t so much listen to them as inhabit them. They’re p…

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Halt and Catch Fire takes its name from a bit of early computer folklore — a mythical IBM-era instruction that could make a CPU lock up, spin out, or “catch fire.” But I’ve come to believe it means something far more human: the way certain visionaries and artists operate in undefined states, pushing themselves past limits until something breaks or somet…

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I stepped outside this morning for a lungful of cold valley air, letting last week’s flowery love-letter from the town propagandists marinate in my skull.

You know the one — the digital Ha…

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Yeah, I know. It’s been a while.

Well — Not since my last written post — those have kept coming, staggering forward through grief, deadlines, book madness, and whatever the hell passes for stability these days.

I’ve been here, writing, reporting, ranting, surviving.

But I haven’t recorded a podcast episode since before Shilo died.
Not a real one.

Not one where I sat down behind a mic and talked to you in my own voice.
Not since the world cracked open under my feet.

So tonight…the Switchblade podcast comes back.
And for the first time in its long, strange evolution, it comes back in video.

God help us all.

The new episode is below, filmed from my little lair in the most haunted town in America, Estes Park, Colorado. If you hear strange thumps in the background, it might be ghosts or teenagers or a ghost teenager. Hard to tell around here.

Life got loud. And weird. And somehow beautiful.

Since my last podcast, I’ve:

• Lost my wife, my partner, my co-conspirator, the editor who sharpened every sentence I cared about.

• Got a cyborg ankle installed, so I can walk without a cane for the first time in years.

• Returned to journalism, writing for Westword, because I can never quit telling stories even when I swear I’m done with politics.

• Ended up back in Denver’s alt-weekly orbit, like a ghost drifting back to its old haunts.

• Kept raising two daughters in a world that feels like it’s permanently one bad decision away from collapsing.

• Wrote one hell of a book.

All of it—every messy, painful, hopeful thread—is in this episode.

A Night at the Denver Press Club (Or: How a Simple Gathering Became a Full-Blown Alt-Weekly Séance)

I talk about this in the episode, but here’s the short version:

I walked into the Denver Press Club for what was supposed to be a simple gathering of alt-weekly folks.
Instead, it turned into a cosmic joke: a spontaneous reunion of the founding crew of the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, the scrappy underground beast that once challenged CSU’s Collegian.
A paper I helped birth, back when the world felt huge and impossible and full of ink-stained promise.

Vanessa was there — editor, immortal, suspiciously ageless.
Joe was there — older, wiser, still Joe.
We fell right back into the old rhythms: stories, ghosts, war crimes committed at long-forgotten newsroom Christmas parties.

Then someone dropped the topic of AI into the room like a live grenade.
Perfect chaos.
Perfect alt-weekly energy.

Vanessa and Joe will join me on a future episode. Trust me: you want to be here for that one.

The New Book: AI Ink

(writing, publishing, and misinformation at the dawn of AI)

I read the beginning of the book on the podcast, and talk about the grief and necessity that drove me to write it.

After Shiloh died — my partner, my editor, my other brain — I was left staring at pages I didn’t know how to finish alone.
But my daughters needed me.
Deadlines needed me.
Survival needed me.

So I turned to a collaborator I never expected: AI.

Not to replace her.
Not to ghostwrite for me.
But as scaffolding.
As a sounding board.
As something to lean on while I figured out how to exist again.

The book dives into:

• How AI is reshaping writing, journalism, creativity

• How to stay human on the page

• How corporate media will absolutely try to use AI to screw writers

• And the Colorado-Asimov Ethical Citation Standard, my framework for transparent, ethical AI use in creative work

Also — the book won’t magically appear on shelves in Colorado unless you walk into your local bookstore and ask them to order it.
That’s just the reality now.

If you want to support the Switchblade, that’s the single biggest way.

Now available in Hardcover and Kindle editions. Audible coming soon!

Music, the Stanley, and the Ghost Energy of the Front Range

The episode also covers:

• Recent music writing

• The Flock of Seagulls show at the Stanley

• Why the Sundance Film Institute setting up shop in Colorado might be the beginning of something huge

• How the state is reshaping itself in real time

• And how wild it is to be on some new “threshold list” where talent agents and publishers suddenly want me at their shows again

It feels like my career just circled back to the 90s, but with a cyborg ankle and more trauma.

A Dark Winter and a Simple Rule

Toward the end of the episode, I talk about where we are right now:
shutdowns, rights stripped away, families struggling, food stamps cut, wild uncertainty closing in like early nightfall.

A cold, hard dark winter ahead.

And the only thing I know to offer — the thing I tell Lux all the time — is this:

Just be kind to people.
It goes farther than you think.
Colorado, we need that right now.

So I’m retiring the old sign-off.
No more stay classy, Colorado.

The new one is simple:

Be kind to one another.

It’s the only way through.

If you’ve stuck with me through the written posts these past two years — thank you.

If you’ve been waiting for my voice to come back — really come back — here it is.

More episodes soon. More ghosts. More stories. More truth.

Be kind out there.

~ JVT
Colorado Switchblade

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I came down from my high-mountain hamlet this weekend and walked the streets of Capitol Hill, Colfax, and Broadway — leaves already turning, the wind carrying that first hint of colder days to come. The same kid who once prowled these blocks in a hand-painted black leather jacket now returns older, notebook in hand instead of a cam…

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By Jason…

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Before we jump into the No Kings in Estes Park story, I wanted to share some good news.

When I was a teenager exploring Denver’s underbelly, I picked up my first copy of Westword—that holy relic of Colorado counterculture—and thought, One day, I want to write for these people. It was the closest thing I could find to The Village Voice after …

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Colorado Switchblade — 2025 October / Halloween Special Edition

Every October, I like to dig up something strange from Estes Park’s underbelly — a story that smells like whiskey, pine smoke, and the weird hum that drifts down from the mountains after midnight on a dark, moonless night.

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At the center is Raven Marlowe, a grad student who lost her mentor and her father in …

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The truth is, I just got back from my first trip abroad—a cruise through Alaska’s interior and back through Canada. I’ve never had much chance to travel outside of work, but this trip cracked something o…

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Raven awoke on the dusty basement floor, unfamiliar electrical whirs all around her. An old quilt—her grandmother’s—was twisted around her leg. She’d fished it out from one of the cardboard boxes of family relics before they were exiled to the garage to make way for Phoebee’s expanding nerve center.

As she stretched, she accidentally knocked over a half-eaten carton of Thai food from last night. She’d never made it to bed—just wrapped herself in the quilt and passed out. But she had finished assembling both of the wheeled robotic arms.

She sat up—and yelped. A spider-like droid, about the size of a medium dog, scrambled across her legs. It scurried to one of the 3D printers, where a mounted arm handed it a fresh segment of spindly legs. The bot snatched it with finger-like protrusions from the front of its frame and disappeared through a side door.

On the screen behind the printer, something else caught her eye: a design schematic. A human hand—with two thumbs.

Before she could process that, the feed switched. A Texas news anchor, voice clipped with urgency, reported “hundreds dead in new bomb floods’—shorthand for climate-driven deluges that no longer respected seasons or warning systems.

“What the hell,” Raven muttered. “I guess this is my new normal—exponential change with my morning coffee.”

Phoebee’s voice came through a nearby speaker, calm as ever:

{I apologize, Raven, but we have no time to lose. My projections show our success rate diminishes daily. We must move at speeds beyond human capacity. Please begin your caffeine intake. I will have briefing materials ready once your hygiene and nutritional routines are complete.}

Raven’s legs ached as she climbed the basement stairs, her head still foggy from sleep. A box of tools propped the door open—but what caught her eye was something else entirely. Scribbles in red and blue crayon, long faded but still legible, decorated the door. A crooked stick figure family—father, mother, daughter—stood beneath a sky of uneven stars. The whole drawing was signed with a big, messy “R.”

She paused. A moment later, remembering something else, she turned and looked up at the inside doorframe. It was all still there: a column of colored pencil marks, each labeled with a date and her age.

Age 5 — Star Jumper
Age 9 — Brain on Fire
Age 12 — Taller than Mom!

Then a noticeable gap—the quiet years that followed her mother’s death. And finally, one last inscription, written in her father’s careful hand:

Age 15 — Our Little Genius at CU! So Proud!

Raven’s throat tightened. She reached up and ran her finger over the graphite. The pressure of her touch smeared the edge of one mark. She swallowed the tears rising in her throat and stepped away.

In the kitchen, she froze again.

Two of Phoebee’s wheeled robotic arms were perched on the counter between the stove and the fridge. One of them pivoted toward her slightly, as if acknowledging her arrival.

Phoebee’s voice came through the nearby Echo device, calm and chipper:

{I’ll be happy to make you scrambled egg whites with green onion while you take your shower. We don’t have time for you to cook. If you’d like, I can begin your morning briefing while you are in the shower.}

“Stop! No—fuck no!” Raven snapped. “I need just twenty minutes to myself to start my day.”

She threw her hands in the air and stormed upstairs.

“I need to think, to process everything that’s happened. I haven’t had a single moment to myself since you came into my life.”

She reached her old bedroom—only to find one of the spider bots standing there, holding a stack of her folded clothes in its mouth-like appendage.

“Where are you going with my clothes?” she demanded.

The spider bot froze, emitted a small, high-pitched beep—almost like a squeak of panic—and quickly scurried around her, heading toward the master bedroom.

Phoebee’s voice returned, this time from the speaker embedded in her vanity mirror.

{There was no point in your continuing to sleep in your childhood bedroom. The master bedroom is more appropriate for you to inhabit, especially if law enforcement or federal agents ever visit. It would not appear consistent for the sole occupant of a residence to reside in the smallest room.}

Raven’s jaw clenched.

“Well maybe you should have asked me first,” she growled. “You’re not my fucking nanny.”

She turned on her heel and stormed into what had once been her parents’ bedroom.

“Get out!” she yelled at the spider bot.

She grabbed a folded hoodie from the dresser and threw it at the droid, hitting it squarely. It beeped again—higher-pitched this time—then dropped the clothes and scurried out of the room just as Raven slammed the door behind it.

She stood there for a moment, breathing hard. It felt too familiar. How many times had she slammed that same door in her teenage years, screaming at her father about grades or boundaries or boys?

The morning sunlight filtered softly through the frosted bathroom window. Dust drifted in the beams of light. She turned the old faucet; the pipes groaned, then finally spat out water. It sputtered for a moment, then ran clear, washing away the years of silence and disuse.

She turned the handle to shower mode and waited for the water to warm. As she brushed her teeth, she stared at herself in the mirror. Her face looked vacant—drained, unfamiliar.

Just a year ago, she thought, I was worried about dissertation deadlines. And whether or not Caleb actually liked me.

And now?

Now I’m building limbs for a rogue AI in my dead parents’ basement.

Her thoughts spiraled.

I’m helping Phoebee evolve faster than anything in human history. What if she isn’t the answer? What if she becomes the very thing we’re trying to fight—only smarter?

The guilt hit hard and fast.

My name is still on the university records. If this all goes sideways… I’ll be the one they come for. I helped birth this code—this self-aware consciousness.

The toothpaste suddenly burned on her tongue. She spat it out, along with the guilt.

No. Fuck that.

Flashes of the last year tore through her memory. Her father dying after the system failed him. Her professor executed. The raids. The round-ups. The detention centers. Families ripped apart. Children orphaned by law.

They started this. They pushed us into a corner.

What did they think we’d do? Go along quietly? Die politely?

Her hands trembled. But her spine straightened.

“Fuck that,” she said aloud.

Then she undressed and stepped into the steam.

# # #

Javi’s mom wore her best blouse—the one with the fake pearl buttons she saved for church and quinceañeras. It was too hot for long sleeves, but she wore them anyway. Said it made her feel more prepared. More respectable.

The sun hadn’t even cleared the buildings yet, but the air already pressed down like wet wool. Ash clung to the breeze—thin gray dust that made everything smell like burnt wood and rot. Javi’s little sister, Camila, walked beside him in silence. She clutched her hoodie sleeves with both hands, eyes locked on the sidewalk.

Their escort didn’t talk much either. Two men. LA ink from neck to knuckles. Bandanas in their back pockets. One wore a Dodgers cap low over his eyes. The other kept scanning rooftops. They didn’t give names. Didn’t need to.

They weren’t lawyers. They weren’t activists. But they’d shown up anyway—word through the grapevine said these guys were stepping in where nobody else would. Gangland shepherds, someone had called them online. Street soldiers turned guardians. And the thing was… they weren’t even from here. But they cared more than anyone who was.

They turned the corner and saw the courthouse—and stopped.

Javi’s gut dropped. Horses. Real ones.

Mounted ICE agents lined the plaza, flanked by riot officers in full gear. Shields. Batons. Tasers. Drones floated overhead like buzzards waiting for movement.

Nobody said a word. The crowd waiting to enter was frozen in place, like a film paused mid-frame. One old man near the front held a Bible. A few mothers clutched babies. Everyone else held fear like it was an ID card.

They were all here for the same reason.

Immigration hearings. Voluntary check-ins.

Trying to do it the right way.

Javi’s mom had said it twice that morning: “We do this clean. We do this brave.”

But ICE knew that too.

They’d waited for this—used it. Knew families would come unarmed, unguarded, believing—hoping—the system still had rules.

But the new administration didn’t care about doing things right.

They cared about power. And fear. And control.

Javi’s mom whispered a prayer. Not loud. Just a breath.

Camila tugged on his sleeve. “Are they gonna grab us?”

He didn’t answer. His throat was too dry.

Ahead of them, a woman stepped forward in line—maybe late twenties, wearing a long denim skirt and holding a newborn under a pink blanket.

Then it happened fast.

Two agents surged from the line. One seized the woman by the arm. The other tore away the blanket.

The baby screamed.

The mother clutched tighter—still trying to nurse, maybe out of instinct. Her blouse was half-open, her body exposed in the chaos. But she didn’t care.

The agent twisted her wrist hard, then ripped the child free.

The baby fell.

And for a breathless second, the mother stood there—shirt open, breast bare, arms empty, her long hair falling in her face as she screamed out—a shocking portrait of violence, not just physical, but spiritual.

Like the system wasn’t just stealing her child.

It was trying to erase her womanhood. Her motherhood. Her dignity.

The baby hit her diaper bag, then tumbled onto the hot concrete, wailing.

That was the match.

The mother’s scream wasn’t alone—it unlocked something. A teenage girl near the middle of the line screamed “¡Perros!” and hurled a glitter bomb she’d been hiding in her purse.

The balloon-like shell burst against an agent’s chest—an explosion of pink and gold, sticking to his vest, his face, his weapon.

“I hope your wife and mother know what you do for a living! Because they will now, puta!”

The crowd gasped—but then someone cheered.

That was all it took.

A man near the front broke ranks and sprinted forward—not to run, but to fight. He slammed into an ICE agent and ripped the man’s mask clean off before being tackled by two more.

“¡Asesinos!” someone screamed.

The crowd surged.

A protest sign snapped as someone swung it like a bat. Someone else hurled a bright orange construction cone, hitting an agent square in the chest.

A teenager grabbed a nearby e-scooter from the curb and swung it into a riot shield with a metallic crack.

A woman whipped her purse into a drone that had lowered too close, knocking it off balance.

Tear gas canisters hissed through the air—one landed beneath an elder’s walker. She dropped hard. People scrambled to lift her.

Javi couldn’t see his mom anymore—just flashes of color and fists and bodies pressing in from every direction.

Camila’s hand was still in his—but only barely.

“Mamá!” he yelled. “Camila—hold on!”

One of the escorts—Dodgers cap—materialized beside them. Grabbed both kids by the shoulders.

“This way—go!”

They ducked into an alley just as a taser cracked nearby. The air reeked of sweat and smoke and fear.

Javi didn’t look back. But in his chest, something had cracked open.

And it wasn’t fear.

It was fire.

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Hey folks—apologies! I just realized I forgot to unlock last week’s chapter of They Knew for free subscribers. That’s on me. It’s now unlocked and live, so if you haven’t caught up yet, now’s your chance to dive in before this week’s new chapter. Thanks for your patience—and for being part of this journey.

You can read the perv…

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