Ex-Politician Concealed UFO Encounter to Avoid Being Called Crazy

A retired attorney general from Wyoming is finally sharing a strange experience he had 35 years ago that he had kept to himself for decades. Richard Barrett, now 73, recalls the night as one that would have been unremarkable if not for an encounter that left him baffled. He had never spoken about it before, thinking no one would believe him. However, recent developments regarding UFOs under President Donald Trump have made him more open to discussing the event.

The president recently released some of the first declassified UFO files, aiming for greater transparency on alleged extraterrestrial incidents. This has sparked renewed interest in such stories, including Barrett's.

The Cowboy State Daily covered Barrett’s story, revealing that he was driving home to Cheyenne with his father, who was a federal appeals court judge, when they came across a massive device. The object rotated above their car and "turned the darkness to day around them" on the highway, according to the outlet. Barrett couldn’t believe what he was seeing as he stuck his head out the window and looked up.

He described the device as silent and not blinking—it was just a bright light. While Barrett estimated it to be 10 stories tall, his father said it was 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."

The lawyers quickly put on their logical brains. At first, they wanted to get out and take a look, but then they thought better of it, opting to slow down and peek out the window. It then vanished nearly as quickly as it appeared.

"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?"

To remember the odd situation, he wrote down what happened a couple of days later. The event took place in April 1991, and he still has those writings.

Stories about UFO abductions immediately popped into mind. Given the wacky circumstances, he considered it to be an actual possibility. He also included the conversation between him and his father that followed:

"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," his dad, James, said.

Barrett said both he and his father expected to see news of the object in the papers the next day, but nothing ever came of it. When they told their families, 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."

His dad actually did share a snippet of the encounter with the Wyoming Department of Parks & Cultural Resources in 2010, but it was never disclosed to The National Reporting UFO Center.

The center lists 446 sightings of strange objects in the Wyoming skies dating back throughout the past century. Some of them include a "green-flashing orb" traveling across the sky to several objects moving in a "triangle formation."

With Wyoming's lack of light pollution, it's common for celestial events to be even more visible there than in other states. University of Wyoming Planetarium Coordinator Max Gilbraith also noted Wyoming skies are used for flight training by the U.S. military.

"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, speaking of two Nevada locations.

The official documentation about UFOs from the Pentagon has renewed interest for Richard, though he's not banking on ever learning real answers.

"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."