UFOs MAKE YUMA, COLORADO, MAN'S LIFE A PIT STOP

POST, Denver, CO
May 9, 2007

He plopped down in a big chair in his sturdy old home on Main Street in this northeast Colorado town, a village nestled in a land where alfalfa grows quickly, time passes slowly and when it turns black at night, well, all kinds of things can dance across the sable sky.

Big Tim Cullen says it was a night like that so many years ago when the lights of a UFO rose over the grassy hills and settled alongside his car. He says he got a good look.

"It was 100 foot long, 30 feet wide and about 10 foot high."

And then it was gone.

On Sunday, just a few weeks shy of the 29th Anniversary of that night in 1978, Cullen leaned back in the chair and talked of that night the spaceship came down. It hovered along Colorado 59 between Yuma and the smaller town of Joes, he says. And even though he doesn't remember this part, Cullen said the aliens took him that night and implanted a strange metal chip in his left wrist - a chip he wouldn't find until 1998.

Cullen isn't alone, of course. Thousands claim they've been abducted by aliens. Hundreds of thousands say they've seen UFOs. Heck, just a few weeks ago a well-respected former Arizona governor said he saw a UFO hovering over Phoenix while he was in office.

"When I saw it, I said, 'this is definitely a UFO,'" ex-Gov. Fife Symington said of the 1997 event. "It was absolutely breathtaking."

Which leads to the obvious question: Arizona had a governor name "Fife"?

And another question: How come it took Cullen 20 years to discover the freaky alien implant in his left wrist? The answer: it took him that long to whack his left thumb with a hammer!

Cullen, 55, stood up Sunday morning and disappeared into a back room of the house where he and his wife have lived for nearly three decades. He came back with an X-ray and held it against the living room window. The images, taken at a Yuma medical clinic, clearly showed a small spot in the wrist, a white trinagular image lodged in the tissue above the bones.

Cullen didn't say a word. Not that he's shy about this. He's been featured on lots of UFO-type websites and even on a Learning Channel show called "101 Things Removed From the Human Body."

But sometimes, he doesn't know what to say. Or what to think.

"It's all so strange," he said quietly.

CRASH KICKED OFF SIGHTINGS

It all began April 2, 1978. He awoke from a dream about a terrible car crash. Seven days later, the car he was driving rolled five times, according to the police report. Cullen, then 27, sufferered a broken neck and other injuries. About seven weeks later, on May 30, while returning from a doctor's apointment in Denver, his neck still encased in a protective collar, the UFO appeared from the darkness where Vernon Road slices through the hay fields and meets the highway. Cullen and his wife, Janet, stared.

"It didn't make any noise," Cullen said.

And that was that.

Until he saw another UFO two years later, in 1980, in the exact same spot along Colorado 59. And then, a third encounter of the "Yipes!" kind came in 1994, 40 miles to the south near the cemetery in Cope.

"That one had blue and white lights," he said.

The story goes quickly then. Cullen whomped his thumb with the hammer in 1998 while trying to drive a steel rod into the ground for a cement project. The ensuing X-ray showed the odd chunk of metal.

"I knew then what had happened," Cullen said. "I knew it was an alien implant from that first encounter in 1978. There was lost time that night. I have to assume I was abducted."

THEY WANT OUR POWERS

Weeks aftr the X-ray, Cullen talked to a reporter at the Yuma newspaper. Word reached the UFO community. Websites trumpeted "The Cullen Abduction." In 2000, he said, he traveled to a clinic in California and had the alien, well, thing removed from his wrist. No one knows what the thing is, he said.

But this is what he believes: the aliens chose him because of his psychic abilities. In addition to the dream of the 1978 car crash a week before it happened, Cullen said there are constant psychic moments n his life. Aliens, he surmises, don't have that power. They are gathering information via these implants from Cullen and others like him.

He got out of his chair then and went to the door. Outside his small home on the Colorado grasslands, branches with tiny new spring leaves rustled in a fresh wind. From his front steps he looked to the west. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon.

"I am totally open to the idea," said Symington, the Harvard-educated former Arizona governor and an ex-Air Force captain, "that whoever they are occasionally pass this way."