LEADVILLE, Oct. 22 — Between the hours of 9:40 and 11:15 on Friday evening, the office of Lake County Sheriff William P. Burke received no fewer than twelve telephone calls from residents of the western slope reporting unusual lights in the sky above the Mosquito Range. The calls originated from points as widely separated as the company town of Climax, the village of Granite, and the outskirts of Buena Vista in neighboring Chaffee County, a span of better than thirty miles. Witnesses described the lights variously as white, pale amber, and, in two instances, a deep rose color. Several callers were emphatic that the objects, whatever their nature, moved “low and slow” along the ridgeline, contrary to the behavior of either aircraft or the meteor showers common to the season.

Among those who telephoned the Sheriff’s office was Mrs. Elinor Klepac, 47, of Climax, who observed the phenomenon from the kitchen window of her residence on Fremont Pass Road for a period she estimated at “ten or fifteen minutes.” Mrs. Klepac, who teaches the junior class at the First Methodist Sunday School, gave this reporter the following account: “There were three of them at first, in a loose triangle, and then a fourth came up from behind the ridge to join them. They did not blink in the manner of an airplane. They held position above the saddle east of Bartlett Mountain for some minutes, and then they moved south along the range, very deliberately, no faster than a man might walk. I called my husband to the window and he saw them also, as did our neighbor Mr. Donlan, whom I telephoned. I am not given to imagining things. I know what I saw.”

Sheriff Burke, reached at his office Saturday morning, expressed a measured skepticism. “We get reports of this kind from time to time, particularly in the fall when the air is clear and people are out of doors,” he said. “Most of them resolve themselves into weather balloons, aircraft running lights, or the planet Venus, which is unusually bright this month.” The Sheriff confirmed, however, that he had dispatched Deputy Carl Henson to the Hayden Pass road shortly after the first calls were received, and that Deputy Henson reported nothing unusual upon his arrival, the lights having dispersed. Sheriff Burke acknowledged, when pressed, that a similar series of reports had been logged by his predecessor in March of 1962, also from the western slope, and that those reports had likewise gone unexplained.

This reporter contacted the public information office at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver on Saturday afternoon. A spokesman, Maj. R. F. Holcombe, offered the following statement: “The standard procedure for non-correlated radar contacts is to refer the matter to Project Blue Book for evaluation. We have no further comment at this time.” Maj. Holcombe declined to confirm or deny whether radar installations at any Front Range facility had registered contacts during the hours in question.

It bears mention that the same Mrs. Klepac, in the summer of 1965, addressed a letter to the editor of this newspaper describing what she then termed a “similar luminous phenomenon” observed over the same stretch of the Mosquito Range. That letter was published in these pages on August 12, 1965, and a copy remains on file at the Herald’s morgue for the inspection of any interested party. Whether Friday’s events relate to that earlier sighting, this reporter declines to speculate.