Driving home to Cheyenne after giving a speech in Gillette with his federal appeals court judge dad in the car 35 years ago would have been long forgotten for retired Cheyenne attorney Richard Barrett, except for one thing.
The massive device that turned the darkness to day around them on state Highway 59 between Gillette and Wright.
It rotated above the car as he stuck his head out the window in April 1991.
It made no noise.
Like any good lawyer, Barrett wrote down his thoughts and the conversation that ensued with his dad a couple of days later to preserve the event.
“Stories about UFO abductions immediately popped into mind. Given the wacky circumstances, I considered it to be an actual possibility,” he wrote, and then Barrett recorded their conversation.
“I’d like to take a closer look dad, but I’m afraid that thing might suck us up. How about you?” he said.
“It’s fine with me if we don’t stop Rich,” James Barrett replied.
The elder Barrett had been Wyoming’s attorney general from 1967 to 1971 and then President Richard Nixon appointed him to the 10th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
He was still serving the court with senior status in 1991. He died in 2011.
Richard Barrett, now 73, said they both expected to see and hear stories in the media from others who may have seen the object that began as a bright star in the western sky and then southeast sky before manifesting above them.
But there was nothing.
They told their families, but their wives thought they were joking.
“My dad and I did not disclose it to third parties for the obvious reason,” Barrett said. “We didn’t want people to believe we were off our rockers.”
With the Trump administration’s recent release of files on unexplained anomalous phenomena, Barrett now feels safe sharing his story with Cowboy State Daily.
His dad had already gone public with his version of the story as part of an oral interview on his life with photographer and journalist Mark Junge for the Wyoming Department of Parks & Cultural Resources in 2010.
Wyoming UFOs
The Barretts’ disclosures never made it to The National Reporting UFO Center, but the center lists 446 reports of strange objects in the Wyoming skies as recent as May 3 and going back into the past century.
The latest report from a Greybull resident listed a “green-flashing orb” above the clouds traveling north to south.
A person in Sheridan reported on April 29 seeing five objects that started as a “triangle formation” that traveled at different speeds passing each other and going in different directions, and then saw “a black thing shoot in the sky like a burning star, except it was not a burning star …”
University of Wyoming Planetarium Coordinator Max Gilbraith said judging and explaining what the Barretts saw 35 years later is impossible.
He knows there have been many other reports of unexplained phenomena in the state’s skies over the years.
“It’s difficult in the realm of scientific process to corroborate things like that,” he said.
Gilbraith said because Wyoming is sparsely populated with less light pollution than other states, more “celestial phenomena” may be noticeable and witnessed than elsewhere around the nation.
Because of the rural nature of the state, he said the U.S. military has also used the skies above for exercises and training that could be mistaken for something other worldly.
He said F.E. Warren Air Force Base, as well as the state’s community airports, also host many irregular flights.
“From what I’ve seen, there is a correlation between UFO sightings and military bases if you talk about the Groom Lake facility or Tonopah or stuff like that,” Gilbraith said.
Both those facilities are located in Nevada.
A Close Encounter
Richard Barrett, who never thought much about UFOs before his encounter in 1991, said he has looked at the release of information put out by the Trump administration’s Department of War.
He hasn’t yet seen anything that resembles the massive object that hovered above him on that April night.
Barrett said he and his dad left Gillette about 11 p.m. and first noticed the object in the western sky about halfway up from the horizon because it was brighter than the stars.
“It wasn’t twinkling,” he said. “It was just consistently a bright light.”
As they watched the light grow more intense, the men both initially thought maybe it was a star. Then it disappeared and reappeared “nearly instantaneously” in the southeast sky.
Barrett said his brain wanted to track how it got there, but there was no understanding of how that happened.
Once that maneuver took place, both father and son had their eyes on the light. They understood it could not be a star.
Barrett said as they looked at it, the object appeared to be closer, and yet far away at the same time.
It disappeared again and reappeared high in the south sky, this time right in front of them, and then elevated for a moment before disappearing and manifesting right above their vehicle.
His initial estimation was that it was 10 stories tall. His dad described it as bigger than a house.
“It’s so large that it covered the area our car was moving south in,” Barrett said. “We can look right up and see this thing, meaning this airborne craft which appeared to be one aircraft but two discs, and it was metallic.”
Barrett said the craft lit up the area he drove through like it was noon.
He described a continuous circuit of rotating lights and at the “apex of the craft” were dark, smoky windows that were maybe 5 feet by 3 feet.
The craft’s discs were slightly oval and appeared as if “one had been planted on top of the other.”
One of the images released by the U.S. Department of War recently included a graphic of a UFO inserted onto a photo of a site that was reported to host a similar craft. (Courtesy U.S. War Department) 
An image of a UFO released by the U.S. Department of War seen in the western U.S. (Courtesy U.S. War Department)
The Light Just Went ‘Poof'
Barrett said there was curiosity and fear happening at the same time as both he and his dad tried to discern what to do and how to respond.
He slowed down to a crawl and became aware that there was no other traffic on the road.
His lawyerly logic quickly set the pros and cons before him.
“I wanted to pull over, stop and get out and just stand and look up at it, however the case counter to that was the fear that once my dad and I were standing outside the car looking up at this thing we’d somehow be taken up into it,” he said.
“And I couldn’t believe I was actually in a situation where that was to me a realistic possibility,” Barrett added.
Barrett said he rolled down his window and looked up at whatever it was, had the conversation with his dad about stopping, received his “deferential” answer, and decided to just keep moving.
He rolled up his window and stepped on the accelerator to get to cruising speed at 65 mph.
The car was still “bathed” in light from the craft above as they headed south on Highway 59 —until it wasn’t.
“The light just went ‘poof,’ off, like someone flipped the light switch and it went completely to just the light from the stars,” Barrett said. “I looked in every direction, like where did this thing go?
"It’s this huge thing above us, the lights go off and it’s gone. … And the thing is, there was no sound, nothing.”
After sitting in silence trying to process what happened, father and son then shared their thoughts and mental notes about what they had just seen and experienced.
Barrett said they arrived in Cheyenne late, he dropped his dad off and went home.
The next morning, both expected to listen to a UFO sighting report in the media. But newspapers, radio and TV stayed silent on their experience.
Barrett said his wife and mom both thought they were playing a practical joke on them with their story because of the family’s history of being pranksters.
No Explanations
Barrett said that as a man of faith, he can’t exclude that God created life on another planet and solar system.
As a man who also loves science and astronomy, he believes it’s “ridiculous” to think how in a universe where distances are measured in millions of light years that Wyoming could be visited by another civilization.
As a man who once was a law partner with Gov. Stan Hathaway, he has tried to stay with the facts about his experience.
He said his 9-year-old granddaughter once asked him if he thought extraterrestrials were piloting the craft. Barrett told her he had “no idea” who was at the controls.
He also does not know where the craft originated or why it chose that night and his trip south with his dad from Gillette to make his night brighter.
“This dump of the latest information from the Pentagon, these declassified files, that hasn’t answered it,” he said. “I don’t hold up hope that I’m ever going to get an answer to exactly what that was, and the who, what, when, where, and why of it.
"I’d like to make sense of it, but at some point you just accept it happened.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
