State Senator Sam T. Taylor's Jellylike Green-Blue Object, La Veta, Colorado

La Veta sits in Huerfano County, Colorado, at the foot of the Spanish Peaks. To the north-west rises Mount Mestas, 11,573 feet high. Until 1949 it was called La Veta Peak. That year it was renamed for PFC Felix B. Mestas Jr., killed in the Second World War.

One of the men who represented this corner of Colorado was Sam T. Taylor. Born in Hastings, he was a former coal miner who had taken a law degree at the University of Colorado and served as Walsenburg county attorney. He sat in the Colorado State Senate from 1934. By 1955 he was the Democratic floor leader.

Friday, November 25, 1955. The day after Thanksgiving. 10:30 in the morning. An object appeared overhead. Taylor described it as dirigible-shaped, fat in front and tapered toward the tail. In another telling, a barrel-shaped craft with a large front end. It was luminous green-blue. And it looked, in the word that would follow the case for decades, "jellylike."

It was diving. According to the Blue Book summary, it "appeared overhead diving at a 45′ angle, then reduced angle to 30′." It made no sound. Taylor said it "flew ten miles before it disappeared over Mt. Mestas." He put its speed at "about half the speed of a meteorite."

The whole thing lasted five seconds.

Investigators interviewed Taylor at the State Capitol in Denver. Their names do not appear in the accounts that survive, and those accounts do not say whether they were Air Force personnel. The report went into the files of Project Blue Book, and the verdict was "Unidentified."

In 1974 the researcher Don Berliner reviewed the Blue Book files at Maxwell AFB and compiled a list of the cases that had never been solved. The La Veta sighting was on it. His summary has since been reproduced by NICAP, by Patrick Gross and by The Black Vault.

No published explanation has ever been offered. No debunking, no reassignment to a known cause. No other witnesses were recorded, and there is no photograph, no radar return and no physical trace. The details do invite one natural question. A brief, silent, glowing green-blue object, descending steeply and then more shallowly, gone behind a mountain in seconds. Taylor himself reached for a meteor as his yardstick. Yet no record of a fireball over Colorado that day has turned up.

The case has found new readers. Denver7 listed it among the top five Colorado sightings uncovered in Project Blue Book. In July 2020, 5280 magazine featured it under the heading "Political Intrigue," noting that Taylor had lobbied the state to build a hydrogen bomb factory. The magazine rated the case low for fear factor and low for believability, but said plainly it was not dismissing the senator as a crank. Westword, too, recalled the luminous green-blue and jellylike object at the base of the Spanish Peaks.

The original file still sits in the National Archives, waiting for a closer reading. Until then, the senator's five seconds remain exactly what Blue Book called them.