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.
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.