Ausso One

**Ausso One** was a bizarre sapient entity that was allegedly witnessed by a Riverton, Wyoming native on the afternoon of October 25, 1974. One of the more well known extraterrestrial sightings among the ufology community, the Ausso One sighting, also known as the Carl Higdon Incident, is also one of the strangest. The witness was, of course, one Carl Higdon, a 41-year-old foreman for the AM Wells Service Company, who encountered the bizarre figure while hunting in the northern half of Medicine Bow National Forest.

After chatting up a friend named Gary Eaton, who was also hunting in the area, Higdon encountered his target, a herd of elk. Firing his Magnum rifle at an exceptionally large specimen, Higdon was dumbfounded to find that he could see the bullet moving through the air in slow motion before it pitifully fell to the forest floor. He then noticed a complete lack of ambient noise that one would expect from a forest. After retrieving the now-misshapen bullet, he turned to his left and saw a strange humanoid figure move out of the shadows of the treeline.

The entity was a thin bipedal creature wearing what appeared to be a black one-piece suit akin to that of a scuba diver. Crossing over the creature's chest were two straps similar to bandoliers; this was accompanied by a belt decorated with a yellow six-pointed star buckle that encircled the waist. The seemingly-male being had yellowish skin, no neck, and a headful of course black hair. Higdon noted that the creature's facial features were rather disconcerting, consisting of a thin lipless mouth containing three large blocky teeth on each jaw, small eyes with no accompanying brows, no discernible chin, and a pair of rigid antennae. Instead of a right hand, the creature possessed a prosthesis that resemble an enormous drill.

The entity casually asked how Higdon was doing to which the latter timidly said "pretty good". After asking Higdon if he was hungry, the creature, who introduced himself as 'Ausso One', deployed a small packet filled with four pills that floated its way over to the startled hunter, who hesitantly swallowed one. Suddenly, Higdon noticed a large transparent cube sitting not far from the pair, which appeared to be the entity's spacecraft. Ausso One invited the frightened witness to join him and when Higdon agreed, his next memory was immediately being on the ship. Higdon noticed that the small group of elk he had been hunting were also aboard the craft in what he took to be a holding cell, but the animals were motionless.

Higdon then realized that he had been strapped to a strange seat via wrist and leg restraints before Ausso One and one of his companions strapped a large wire-covered helmet to his head. Ausso One telepathically caused the ship to lift off into the sky, where it hovered above Higdon's parked truck and caused it to vanish into thin air. The craft launched into space and, seemingly instantaneously, arrived on another planet dominated with an enormous tower that dwarfed all other structures. The craft abruptly landed near the base of the tower.

Viewing the outside world through the walls of the craft, Higdon claimed to have seen five humans mingling with each other: a young brunette girl, a young blonde teenage girl, a couple in their late teens, and a middle-aged man. Ausso One claimed that the planet they were now on was 163,000 'light miles' rather than light years. Ausso One and Higdon made their way into the tower (via hovering above the floor) and the former instructed the latter to stand on a platform in the center of a large room. A glass pane resembling a medieval shield emerged from the wall and began scanning Higdon for several minutes, only for Ausso One to tell the confused man that he didn't "suit their purpose".

Within a second, the two were back aboard the cubical ship where the entity showed interest in the hunting rifle. Ausso One returned the rifle to Higdon and confiscated the rest of the pills before the hunter abruptly was teleported back to the forest before sliding down a nine-foot embankment due to unfortunate placement. For three miles, Higdon trudged down the road with several injuries brought on by the fall and, suffering a bout of amnesia, climbed into the first truck he saw on the side of the road, which later turned out to be his teleported several miles from where he had parked it last. After communicating with the authorities via the truck's CB radio, Higdon was eventually rescued near midnight. Higdon, who began rambling at length about his encounter, was taken by authorities to Carbon County Memorial Hospital, where it was discovered that extensive scarring in his lungs that he been detected years prior in 1958 was no longer present.

Most of Higdon's memory of the event was only 'unlocked' after hypnotic therapy sessions with Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle, a hypnotist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Wyoming. In these sessions, Higdon recalled that the creatures wore their black suits to protect them from our sun's harsh rays and that they used Earth as a game preserve to hunt for food, the presumed reason for the abduction of the elk. The creature's allegedly also told him that the humans had been abducted for breeding purposes but that he didn't suit their needs due to a vasectomy he had undergone years prior.