More people have probably thrown away their adult lives trying to investigate and solve Fortean conundrums (UFOs, bigfoot, cattle mutilations, et cetera) than ever threw them away on guru cults or Trotskyism.
Author Ben Mezrich has written a paean to one of these "pure products of America." Chuck Zukowski's first twenty years as an investigator of UFOs is chronicled in Mezrich's 2016 book The 37th parallel : the secret truth behind America's UFO highway.
Most of the book is spent following Zukowski's expanding on-site investigations of cattle mutilations in his home state of Colorado. But eventually, supported by his sister Debbie and his patience-of-a-saint wife Tammy, he accumulates enough empirical evidence that he experiences a stunning middle-of-the-night revolution in his thinking.
….He flicked on the lights to his office and slowly approached the enormous map hanging from the wall.
There were so many pins now, of so many different colors, that the thin, glossy material looked bowed in the middle. The contours of the United States were plumped out by the pull of gravity and so many marked anomalies that the map looked a little like one of his investigations, like a carcass that had been sitting at the edge of a stream too long. And yet it wasn't the entirety of the map that possessed Chuck, at that moment, it wasn't the rainbow of pushpins or what they represented. It was just two of those pins—bright green, fifteen hundred miles apart.
Chuck stood there, back to the closed door, shifting his gaze from one of those pushpins to the other. Virginia, to Trinidad, Colorado, and back again.
Even without the weight of all Chuck's anomalies and investigations, the map was drawn with a slight curve—an attempt at projecting, in two dimensions, the area's true geographical parameters, taking into account the curvature of the Earth and the oblong nature of the north-south axis. Because of this, it wasn't instantly obvious from a casual glance, but as Chuck focused back and forth between the two green pins, it became clear: The two earthquakes had occurred fifteen hours apart, more than fifteen hundred miles apart, along the same parallel.
This wasn't the revelation that had jarred Chuck awake for the second night in a row: In fact, he'd noticed the odd coincidence earlier that day, while at his desk at the microchip company he was currently freelancing for. After reading about the Virginia quake that afternoon, he'd pulled up an app on his phone that recorded earthquake data from around the world and had taken note of the data. The Colorado quake had occurred along the Sangre de Cristo fault line, with coordinates of 37.0412° N, 104.4726782° W. Meaning the disturbance had occurred along the 37th parallel—a fixed geographical location based on a point's distance from the equator, the horizontal "center" of the mostly spherical Earth. Each "imaginary" latitude line was exactly parallel to the equator, measured in perfect increments from the North Pole, at 90° North, to the South, at 90° South.
The Virginia quake, it turned out, had been due to a tectonic shift at the Central Virginia Seismic Zone, at the coordinates 37.557787° N, 77.554492° W.
Again, on the 37th parallel.
Two earthquakes, both the strongest in years occurring on the same parallel, separated by fifteen hundred miles.
Chuck considered himself a scientist. He spent his work hours as an engineer, and his investigative time attempting to apply scientific methods and equipment to phenomena most usually described as paranormal. He knew that two data points like the two quakes meant nothing; they were most likely a meaningless coincidence. Millions of earthquakes a year occurred all over the world, and many of them had to be occurring on the same parallels. That was simple statistics. And besides, he wasn't a seismologist. There were plenty of conspiracy theory links between seismological events and paranormal phenomena, but that wasn't Chuck's focus.
What had torn through Chuck's mind and woken him up was something that occurred to him, subconsciously, when he'd been placing those pins earlier in the day.
Over the past year, since the events at the Rush ranch and his subsequent firing from the sheriff's department, Chuck had thrown himself headfirst into his investigations, mostly focusing on animal mutilations, adding in the odd UFO sighting that reached his attention. Although he'd lost much of his access to the reports that came through the police department or via other officers, his firing had actually caused his public profile to get bigger. Andy Koen and his local TV affiliate reported on Chuck's unceremonious expulsion from the force, and that had been carried by multiple media outfits, making headlines across the state. The reports hadn't always been kind—being fired from the sheriff's department for investigating cattle mutilations and for studying UFOs was controversial enough on its own, without the department's continued insistence that he'd been fired for contradicting them in public, not for being the Mulder of El Paso. But either way, the notoriety had given him the publicity he'd needed to step up his investigations—and to begin getting to anomaly sites faster than ever before.
Hard evidence still eluded him, but over the past year, he'd kept his veterinary associates at the university busy with almost-fresh carcasses, and he'd been adding mostly confirmed, unexplained mutilations to his map at a geometric rate.
So many data points, so many colored pins. Looking at them, he could see past the plastic and the punctured map, beyond the imprint behind the glossy material to the spot where his daughter's Mickey Mouse poster had once happily hung, beyond his house to those ranches where he'd stood, sometimes knee-deep in mud, looking down at a murdered, bloodless cow or horse. He could smell the death in the air, could hear the ranchers' heavy breaths as they contemplated such brutality. So many data points, like stars in the unobstructed Colorado sky. More than twenty years of data, his life's work, his obsession, the only thing that could possibly have ever come between him and his wife, a random swirl of color and carcasses and unexplained, unimaginable chaos.
And yet, there was something more. Chuck was suddenly sure of it.
Without really thinking, he reached forward and began pulling off pins. Not at random—he pulled only the pins that were unconfirmed sightings or mutilations, the pins signifying reports that had yet to be studied, calls that had come in through his sister at MUFON or through his own sources or due to his own muted celebrity. Reports that hadn't been investigated, that might very well have been pranks or hoaxes or mistaken identities—airplanes flying where they weren't supposed to, navy missile launches, crop dusters, actual weather balloons.
He kept pulling pins, leaving only the unexplained mutilations or UFO sightings he himself had studied, or that had been confirmed via history, MUFON, or his sister. He kept pulling pins, until suddenly, he stopped and stepped back.
To his utter shock, he saw something quite spectacular:
A surprising majority of the animal mutilations and UFO sightings bunched along one geographical band, spanning across the midsection of the map. Where the scientist in Chuck would have expected a random distribution of events, what he was looking at was a mathematically significant pattern.
Chuck stared. And then he reached forward and began furiously yanking all the pins from the map. The Rush horse mutilation that had gotten him fired from the sheriff's department. The mutilation at Duran, his aborted Star Team excursion. The Taos Hum, which had been documented by so many over so long a period. The Mantell UFO sightings in Kentucky. Mutilation after mutilation, anomaly after anomaly, UFO sighting after sighting. He pulled all the pins until the map was bare, its glossy surface broken only by a rolling sea of tiny puncture marks.
He turned to his filing cabinets, pulling open drawer after drawer, retrieving folder after folder, piling them on the desk, the floor, every open surface, until he was standing in a sea of folders….
Chuck knew that the human mind was built to seek out patterns and that much smarter men than he had driven themselves crazy chasing symmetries that seemed to make sense in the dead of night, but were nothing more than shapes and shadows in the bright light of day. But where the mind could play tricks, numbers were anchors into the real world. Numbers, math, science, these were the tools of the skeptical—and the numbers were telling him that he'd stumbled onto something mind-blowing.
Standing there, staring at the map, he realized he needed help; maybe not the sort of "help" Tammy might have only semijokingly suggested, but help from a like mind.
He reached across to his desk and found his cell phone, then snapped a picture of the map and put the photo into a text.
Less than three minutes later, his office was filled with the first few bars of the X-Files theme song, as his phone began to ring.
• • •
"What the hell am I looking at?"
Debbie sounded surprisingly awake for four-thirty in the morning. Chuck hadn't been surprised that her phone ringer had been on that late into the night. She was one of the top field agents at MUFON, after all, and UFO reports tended to come at night, but usually she ignored him just long enough to piss him off. Then again, the photo wasn't something so easy to disregard.
"I'm still trying to decide what to call it. The Paranormal Highway has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Or maybe the 37th latitude, or parallel. Let it be more of a mystery, because hell, that's what it is, isn't it?"
The 37th parallel wasn't entirely accurate. Although many, if not most of the phenomena seemed to have occurred on the geographical 37th latitude, a number were closer to the 36th or 38th. Chuck liked the mental image of a highway extending between the 38th and 36th parallels that encompassed the majority of anomalies.
"These pins . . ."
"Cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, most of your MUFON reports. I focused only on the reports I could reasonably verify or had studied myself. It's only partially complete. But I think it's still pretty impressive."
"No kidding."
Debbie was quiet on the other end for a moment. Then Chuck could make out the rustling of papers in the background; she'd obviously shifted to her own home office, which was similar to his own, minus a few dozen plastic alien toys.
"Funny thing, Chuck. We've been looking into a couple of big cattle mutilations here in Missouri, one in Norwood, one in Piedmont. I'm checking for the coordinates on them—yes, both on the 37th."
"Pretty strange, isn't it?"
"Joplin Spook Lights, Missouri, 37.090514. The Mantell Incident, Owensboro, Kentucky, 37.7737. The incident in Irvington, Kentucky, 37.881967, 86.284218. Aztec, New Mexico, 36.830447. Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 37.313656. Taos. Quite a highway."
"The only big hitter that's missing is Roswell," Chuck said. "Roswell is on the 33rd. But you know, when you think about the connection between Roswell and the original flying saucer reports made by Kenneth Arnold near Mount Rainier, just a few days before the Roswell crash, well, anything moving from Rainier to Roswell would have to pass right through our highway."
Maybe he was grasping to add a data point. One more anomaly that fit or didn't wasn't going to change whatever it was they were looking at; if every latitude could be imagined as some sort of highway running horizontally across the country, it appeared that the 37th was the most traveled by the sort of anomalies the two of them had dedicated their lives to studying.
"I think we can take this further," Debbie said. "When Bigelow's NIDS was looking into the Big Black Deltas, the first thing they did was try to link the sightings with known or unknown military bases. If we take the same tack, I think we're going to find a few more interesting data points. Because looking at your map, I'm pretty sure Area 51 is on the 37th. And so is NORAD, at Cheyenne."
"The Pentagon is on the 38th," Chuck said. He was already back into his files. Searching for more military bases, he also found himself noticing other landmarks with a connection that might be relevant—American Indian sites, both sacred and historic. Most tribes had their own unique mythologies involving the outer-worldly—he wondered if there might be some reason for so many of their important sites to be linked to this same paranormal highway. Either way, he was already adding more pins to his map….
"Am I just going crazy?" he said, into the phone. "Or is this something?"
"I don't think the sentiments are mutually exclusive. Some of this has got to be coincidence. Some of it is probably related to the reporting mechanisms. Where we're situated is informing the kind of reports we see, and the ones we can verify. But even with all of that—I wouldn't expect this much of a correlation."
Chuck agreed. There was clearly a pattern here: A highway of anomalies spreading from one end of the country to the other, along the 37th parallel.
"What do you want to do with this?" Debbie said. "Put out a press release?"
There was no humor in her voice—she knew Chuck had always believed in publicizing everything he'd found, as early as possible.
"If you're wrong, if this is nothing but coincidence, paranoia, insanity, you'll look like an idiot. If you're right—that might be worse."
He guessed where Debbie's thoughts had gone. Scammon, Kansas. Chuck could see the pin right there on his map, 37.2783, right along the 37th parallel.
He didn't need to go to Kansas to face his own fears. Hell, he wondered what he'd see, parked along the curb, if he pulled back that window shade on the other side of his office.
"I need to dig deeper, continue investigating. But where do I even begin?"
"I think you began more than twenty years ago."
She was right. Without realizing it, he had been studying incidents along this paranormal highway for most of his life. Two decades of UFO sightings and animal mutilations, scattered along a geographical line that had also, apparently, been the latitude of choice for government bases and American Indian holy sites.
What he'd uncovered was the bare beginning of something—there were many directions he could go from where he stood. Using his training as a deputy, he thought: What made the 37th unique, what might link all these sites, these anomalies? Magnetic properties. Astronomical connections. Solar, lunar, wind, geology.
He could spend his life searching for an answer.
Hell, he would spend his life searching for an answer. Animal mutilations, UFO sightings, military bases—all gathered along a geographical line running down the center of the country. Somehow, there had to be a connection.
Running his finger along the map, he found himself pausing over a clump of colored pins.
"I can think of at least one natural starting point. From Area 51, through my mutilations and sightings in Colorado, past the Taos Hum. The first significant cluster of phenomena—cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, supposed underground military base, even Skinwalkers . . ."
"Dulce," Debbie said.
Dulce, the Archuleta Mesa, Ute Mountains. The location encompassed the Gomez ranch, where more than fifty cattle had been mutilated, leading to an investigation that had found evidence of some sort of flying craft in the vicinity, as well as witness reports of unmarked helicopters—considered a sign of military interest, if not involvement. The Gomez mutilations that had led the New Mexico senator to push for a federal investigation. Likewise, the high frequency of incidents—mutilations, UFO reports, Skinwalkers—had caught the interest of Bigelow's NIDS organization. Bigelow had sent some of the same scientists he'd embedded in Skinwalker Ranch in Utah to investigate Dulce. If Bigelow believed Dulce was worth real scientific analysis, it was a good place for Chuck to start.
In fact, Chuck realized, he had already started with Dulce nearly a decade ago.
Without warning Debbie, he placed his cell phone down on the corner of his desk and dug back into his files, pushing through pile after pile until he found the correct folder. He paused briefly on the photos—Kodaks, mostly, old enough that the color was bleeding in some places, mostly of his kids and Tammy, a couple from inside the RV, only one or two of the mountain range itself and the nearby backside of the Archuleta Ridge. But he didn't need photos to remember the strange, bright lights in the sky, or that scream from the elk, or whatever it might have been, that had died, gone silent, so suddenly.
Not Dulce, exactly, but very close—right up in the great Sleeping Ute Mountain, so named because it was supposed to resemble a Ute tribal chief, supine and slumbering. The same Ute tribe whose mythology Bigelow's people had gotten to know so well at Skinwalker, the same mountain range that supposedly harbored an underground base that many believed was connected to something anomalous.
Chuck had once taken his family in his RV to that spot right smack along the 37th parallel, a place he'd been drawn to by an email from a psychic, a place he believed he'd seen a UFO.
Back then, he'd been such a novice, such a hobbyist. He'd been so careful—with his kids and wife at the nearby motel waiting for him, he hadn't gone any deeper down the MUFON category scale than a moderately close contact. He'd seen the lights in the sky and had heard the animal go down, but he hadn't followed the noise down the tree line, he hadn't looked for the place where whatever had happened, happened.
He looked up from the file, toward the map on the wall.
His kids were mostly grown up. He was an expert in animal mutilations and UFOlogy. He'd been playing an odd cat-and-mouse game with some sort of ever-watching organization, be it Bigelow, the government, god only knew. He'd lost his job as a sheriff's deputy, and was publicly known as a UFO nut.
This wasn't a hobby anymore.
He knew exactly where he needed to go. But first he had to present his theory to an audience much more intimidating than Debbie, who was born to believe. Before he headed back into the mountains, he had to take what he had discovered across the hall.
• • •
Halfway in, Chuck became flustered, lost, while trying to find the right language to make what he was saying sound anything but insane.
To his surprise, Tammy finally saved him from himself, interrupting him with the words he should have started with in the first place:
"So you believe there's some sort of UFO highway running along the 37th parallel?"
It was now a few minutes after five, and Tammy still looked half asleep, her hair in tangled twists above her head, a pillow still tucked under one arm as she stood next to him in the open doorway to his office. His presentation had started in the bedroom, but he'd quickly realized he wasn't going to get anywhere talking to a sea of sheets. If Tammy was going to understand, if she was going to at least listen, she needed to see it for herself.
And somehow, amazingly, she had seen it, and she hadn't yet run from the room screaming. That had to be a good sign.
"Coincidence?" she said.
"Maybe. Quite possibly."
After a long pause, Tammy finally spoke again.
"So where do we go from here?"
Chuck felt the smile move across his lips. He doubted she believed, any more than she'd ever believed.
But once again, she was willing to follow him down the rabbit hole.
I've spent thirty years of recreational escapist reading on Fortean fare: authors from Colin Wilson to Whitley Strieber to Charles Fort himself and beyond. The anecdotal conundrums obsessing Chuck Zukowski are not his alone, yet getting to a national kernel in all the evidence is as far away as ever.
Jay
13 July 2021
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