LOcation of the disappearing entrance in the Sangre de Cristos.

[I was recently contacted by an ex-special ops military member who had a strange sighting of an apparent phantom opening in a cliff face in the mountains between the Great Sand Dunes Oasis and the entrance to the National Park. The sighting event took place in late 2002. The witness asked me if I knew of any large mine or cave openings in the area, but to my knowledge there are none at the long/lat coordinates he provided. There is a mine about 1/2 mile south, but it is not visible from the road because the area is obscured by a ridgeline. It is interesting to note that this is the second “official” report of a similar sighting of an opening from this part of the mountain range. Back in the late ‘90s, I also heard a second-hand account that mentions a similar sighting from approximately the same general area of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. -- Christopher O’Brien]

REPORT:

“My ex-wife and I (back in 2002) were going to check out the sand dunes and she was scouring the mountain-side for anything "unusual".

“I've knew of the strange goings-on in this area from your first two books and we saw the opening. We thought it was a mine entrance because it was clearly square and black. We pulled the van over on the side of the road and carefully studied it with our binoculars. That was it, we had to investigate. We grabbed a daypack, a machete, and our digital camera and started up the side of the mountain. It was still wintertime so there was snow on the ground. We kept an eye on the opening as we ascended.

“We came across some strange tracks in the snow. Six foot span between footprints and looked like three toes, but a very thin width. Not a human track. It made us uncomfortable, but we kept on. We finally got up to where the opening was supposed to be and there was nothing, just mountain. It was very quiet and we both sensed a very strong sensation of being watched and we did not feel like we were supposed to be there. So we got a little frightened and headed back to the van as quickly as we could, because the sun was setting and I didn't want to

be up there when the sun went down.

“It might have been possible that we didn't go up the mountain high enough because the area where we thought the entrance was at was very difficult to climb higher without better gear. But I was sure we had gotten to the correct spot where the entrance was.

“But we took pictures of the opening going up and as we got about half-way down there the opening was again. We took more pics. Pics of the footprints too with the machete for comparison. We got back down to the van and as we drove off I uploaded the pictures to our high-end laptop (I was in Information Security at the time). We both looked at each of the pictures on our laptop and couldn't wait to show them to some of our friends. We didn't have any internet access on the road.

“We traveled down into NM and drove through the town of Dulce, NM. I never told my ex about ANYTHING regarding Dulce and she told me that she HATED the feeling of that area as did I. Very oppressive. We didn't stop traveling until we got close to the Arizona border and then we stopped for the night and slept in our van.

“The next morning I wanted to look at the pictures again and when I got into the laptop and the folder I uploaded them to, they were gone! JUST the photos of the SLV stuff. Everything else was fine, but the pictures of the opening, footprints, etc had vanished! I even made sure that I did not delete them from the digital camera, just in case, and the SAME THING, just those pictures were gone! Now, my ex and I are very savvy computer experts and I was very security minded. Encrypted harddrive, firewall, password protection, you name it. They were there the previous evening and now they were gone. Nothing else was gone just those photos. We couldn't believe it. To this day it still boggles my mind. Have you ever experienced something like this before?”