Jan Glidewell: I sat, a few nights ago, trying very hard not to think a whole lot about where I was. It was beautiful in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, with the Sangre De Cristo mountains rising on one side and the kinder, gentler San Juan range on the other.I watched a full moon, occasionally blocked by scudding black clouds, rise over mountains whose blood-red color resulted in their being named for the blood of Christ, and convinced myself that I was only moderately afraid.The San Luis Valley is a site well-known to UFO buffs, fans of the supernatural and conspiracy theorists. It is one of the primary UFO sighting locations in the United States, and, when cattle mutilations were the "in" thing with alien invasion buffs, the valley was also the site of more of those than any other area.And it's not hard to find a few locals or longtime transplants who will tell you about energy vortexes, strange aircraft flying in and out of mountain caves and even, as one guy in a bar in nearby Salida explained to me one night, "gridding."Gridding is very popular with conspiracy buffs who think gridlike patterns that look to the rest of us like jet contrails are actually signs of mind-control chemicals being dropped on us by the government.

Of course, a government that has been able to sell us some of the things we seem to have swallowed en masse lately doesn't seem to need much in the way of mind control chemicals.But, back to the things of which I was more immediately afraid.The fact that I was at a fairly isolated campsite made me wonder, for the first time in years, what would happen if I had a heart attack. Then I convinced myself to calm down and stop borrowing trouble.

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