I’ve been trying to get the sheriff to let me into his files because he’s got a whole cabinet of it. But he’s running for re-election and he’s worried he’ll lose face if people know he’s been collecting this information.”Not that he’d be likely to lose any credibility with the electorate of Rachel itself. The opinions I heard expressed there ranged from the far side of open-minded to downright wacky, some might say mad. “We had an inspector come from Carson City and put a Geiger counter over it and it was radioactive. The coyotes wouldn’t eat it.” Cattle mutilation is a phenomenon that ufologists often link to UFO sightings. “At first my dad thought it had been struck by lightning – until we saw everything that had been done to it.”Its sexual organs had been removed.

There were perfectly round holes in all of the joints and in the ear and the lip. It had been drained of blood, and yet there were no bloodstains, either on its body or in the immediate vicinity. Her family used to farm a million-acre ranch, 100 miles across the desert from Rachel. One morning, the cowboys came up to the farmhouse, badly shaken. “They told us that they were already packed and leaving because what they’d seen had scared them so badly,” she says It was a dead bull.

“When I turned my lights back on, all of theirs went back on – but by then they had moved about five miles to the south. That was the first time in my life that it occurred to me that if I could see them, they could see me. It took me about 30 minutes to make the 70 miles home.”Her fear rekindled the memory of another mysterious phenomenon, she says. There were three UFOS, each about 100ft across, and they had three huge globes of light underneath them.