The first strange thing that happened that night was the TV turning on by itself.
My family had come up to visit us in northwest Montana. We’d just finished dinner, and my middle daughter was at the window pointing at something in the sky. I told her what I’d have told anyone: “It’s okay, honey. It’s just a star.”
It wasn’t a star. There were nine of them, strobing purple, yellow and green at the edges, darting in and out of the trees and moving in ways I was taught physics doesn’t allow. Everyone in that house watched them for about four hours.
And every time I walked up to the window for a better look, the TV switched on. Only when I did it. We took the remote out of my hand and put it on a table across the room. I walked back to the window, and the TV came on again. We finally unplugged it.
Before Montana, I’d been a fairly vehement non-believer. I had an uncle who loved telling UFO stories, and I made fun of him relentlessly. After that night, I had to pick up the phone and apologize to him.
That night is in my new book. It’s tagged CLAIMED, because I’m a named witness telling you what I saw, and I can’t hand you proof.
The book
It’s called The Field Guide to Alien Races: Who They Are, Where They’re Seen, and What They Want. It’s a 174-page, full-color, illustrated guide to the beings people say they’ve met, and the first volume in a new series, A Colorado X-Files Field Guide.
PDF edition, $12.99, available right now: the Colorado X-Files shop
Paperback, $29.99: Amazon
Why I wrote it
In September, I told you I was done writing about what divides us. I didn’t stop asking questions. I just pointed them somewhere else. This book is where that led.
Over the last few years, the people saying “they’re here” stopped being guys selling tapes at conventions. They’re former Pentagon officials, an intelligence officer testifying under oath, Apollo astronauts and a former Canadian defense minister.
If disclosure comes, in whatever form it takes, a lot of people are going to wake up one morning in a different world. They’ll have questions their parents never had to answer. Who are they? Where are they? What do they want? Are they all the same?
This is the field guide for that morning. Think of a bird guide, or a guide to wild mushrooms: what’s reported to be out there, what it looks like, where it’s been seen, and how to tell one from another.
What a tag looks like
The best way to show you how the book works is one story from the Greys entry.
In 1961, Betty and Barney Hill came home from a late-night drive through New Hampshire with hours they couldn’t account for. Under hypnosis, Betty described being shown a star map aboard a craft, and she drew it.
An Ohio schoolteacher and amateur astronomer named Marjorie Fish spent about five years trying to match that drawing to the real sky. She landed on the Zeta Reticuli system, which is where the name “Zeta Reticulans” comes from. Astronomy magazine ran her match in 1974, and it became a sensation. Carl Sagan pushed back.
Then better measurements of nearby stars in the early 1990s broke her match. In 2008, Fish herself said she now felt the correlation was unlikely.
So in the book, the star map is CLAIMED. The Zeta Reticuli match is DISPUTED, including by the woman who made it.
That’s the whole idea. Every claim in the book carries one of four tags: DOCUMENTED, CLAIMED, LORE or DISPUTED. Every main type gets a Skeptic’s corner, and there’s a chapter on hoaxes and how not to get fooled. I’m a believer now, but I’m still a journalist, and I’m going to show you my work.
What’s inside
The main types: Greys, Nordics, Insectoids, Reptilians, Tall Whites, plasma and energy beings, and the hybrids. Each gets a full spread with witness descriptions, the landmark cases and a field card.
The rest of the field: one-time visitors like the Flatwoods Monster and the Hopkinsville Goblins, the Men in Black and the contactees.
Where they’re said to be: underground, undersea and on the Moon.
The bigger picture: encounters before Roswell, Indigenous star knowledge, the Bigfoot-UFO connection, and the “hitchhiker effect” that picks up where our Jay Stratton story left off.
After disclosure: what the insiders want released, and what the rest of us should demand.
Every illustration is an artist’s rendering, made with AI tools under my direction from witness descriptions, and labeled that way. They’re pictures of what people say they saw, not photographs.
This book is independent, and that’s where you come in
There’s no publisher behind this book, no marketing department and no real ad budget. It’s me, the show and you.
The first couple of weeks matter most for a new book. Early sales and reviews are what put it in front of people who’ve never heard of me. If you want to help, here are three things you can do:
Get a copy. The PDF from the shop puts the most back into the show and the next guide. Want a signed paperback? Email me at coloradoxfiles@gmail.com.
Leave an honest review on Amazon once you’ve read it. Honest is the important word: good, bad or in between.
Forward this email to one person who loves this stuff. That one’s free, and it matters just as much.
This is Volume 1. Next up is a field guide to UFO and UAP craft, followed by The Agencies, Sasquatch and the cryptids of North America.
Keep the lights on
If you’re not subscribed to the Colorado Switchblade yet, it’s free, and it’s where the deeper reporting lives.
On YouTube, like, subscribe and share The Colorado X-Files. Along with the book, the shop has tees, hoodies, mugs, hats and slate coasters I engrave myself in Estes Park. Every purchase funds the investigations.
Seen something you can’t explain? It might belong in the next guide. The tip line is coloradoxfiles@gmail.com.
Sources
The Field Guide to Alien Races (Jason Van Tatenhove, 2026): the author’s sightings (Introduction) and the Betty Hill star map (Greys entry, which cites Astronomy, “The Zeta Reticuli Incident,” Dec. 1974, and Fortean Times, “Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli,” Nov. 2008)
The Field Guide to Alien Races (PDF Edition) (Colorado X-Files shop)
The Field Guide to Alien Races (paperback) (Amazon; ISBN 9798141339011)