I grew up in Colorado and spent many years working at newspapers in Colorado, Arizona, and Wyoming. I love the West and hope to retire there someday. The West is in my heart.

When most folks think of the West, they envision a land in which the echoes of homesteaders, cowboys, Indians, and Manifest Destiny still echo. But there’s another side to the West whose echoes you only hear late at night; you’d best listen to these tales with the lights on. Such weird West stories range from legends of cryptids like the thunderbird to accounts of strange doorways into parallel universes.

Tall tales collect a patina of reality out West because so many still lie at the edge of living memory and are told and retold by those who insist they witnessed the events. Besides, as a newspaper editor in John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” famously observes, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

A recent series of books by David Paulides of the CanAm Missing Project explores the disturbing possibility that for more than a century, people have disappeared under unusual circumstances in wilderness areas. In his books, Paulides also claims that this phenomenon isn’t restricted to the United States and that clusters of similar disappearances exist worldwide.

I’ve been following his research since discovering Paulides’ books several years ago. I just purchased his latest volume, “Missing 411: The Devil’s in the Detail,” the list of oddities in the Great Outdoors continues as regularly as Old Faithful eruptions.

I’m fascinated by Paulides’ research because almost 50 years ago, I experienced something similar that I still can’t fully explain — and even writing about it now makes me uncomfortable.

Alone in the middle of nowhere

When I worked for the Daily Rocket-Miner in Rock Springs, Wyoming, as a reporter and photographer, I discovered an old 4×5 Crown Graphic camera in a darkroom closet. Our publisher told me I could shoot some test images with it, so I talked a friend of mine into driving me out to Boar’s Tusk. I needed a cover photo for the Progress Edition, and this stark rock formation out in the Red Desert would be good.

My friend Dennis (not his real name) had just bought a Ford Bronco and agreed to drive me out to Boar’s Tusk one Saturday. We’d made it nearly there when clouds began to move in. A thunderstorm was imminent, so I decided to slap on a red filter and grab a few shots of Boar’s Tusk framed by dramatic clouds before the sky opened.

Dennis pulled off the gravel county road, and I set up my tripod, mounted the vintage press camera, and pointed it at the distant remnant of an ancient volcano. I took light meter readings and was about to slide in the film when Dennis approached me, leaned close, and whispered: “Something’s wrong here. We need to get out of here NOW.”

He told me to loudly ask him to return to the truck and get some more film — and that when he’d reached the vehicle, I should quickly fold up the tripod with the camera still attached, carry it to the back of the truck, throw it in, and climb into the passenger side.

That’s what I did. A second after I got in the Bronco, Dennis fired it up and sped out as fast as he could. He didn’t slow down until we were back on pavement at least five to 10 miles away.

I was maybe 22 at the time, and Dennis was in his mid-30s. He was an experienced hunter and outdoorsman who didn’t drink to excess or do drugs.

People were hiding — and watching us

Once he’d calmed down, Dennis told me that a couple of minutes after we got out of the truck, he noticed a disturbing lack of insect sounds — and that in late summer, the place should have been screaming with noise.

What he said next still gives me goosebumps. Dennis said he saw at least two human eyes staring at us.

I told him that was crazy. There was no place for people to hide, and the sparse scrub and sage were maybe three feet tall at most.

That’s when Dennis said the people had been lying on the ground and holding what he took to be rifles.

Dennis drove back to Rock Springs and kept checking the rearview. My friend didn’t want to return to his place, so he spent the rest of Saturday at my apartment. Neither of us could sleep, and although we hadn’t seen anybody following us, at one point, we became convinced “people” were combing Rock Springs looking for us.

Neither of us could get to sleep.

Would authorities think we’re crazy?

By noon Sunday, we still hadn’t calmed down much and thought about calling the police and sheriff’s office. Then, suddenly, we both felt a strange sense of calm and realized that nobody had followed us. We began to consider the possibility that nobody had been out there in the desert watching us at all.

Both of us were starving, and it occurred to me that we hadn’t eaten or slept in more than 24 hours. So we walked over to the Taco John’s just up the street from my tiny apartment. I specifically remember ordering a taco salad, a taco burger, and a large cola.

Neither of us told friends or family about the incident until years later. I’ve since lost touch with Dennis.

As the decades passed, I decided that Dennis and I must have somehow locked our thought processes into some mutual feedback loop that amplified our paranoia into a brief, self-limiting, synchronized psychosis.

Several weeks previously, we had rambling, late-night discussions about the cattle mutilation cases unnerving ranchers across the Rocky Mountain West. I had also recently become obsessed with UFOs reported near Pinedale, Wyoming, and had interviewed the University of Wyoming’s Dr. Leo Sprinkle about his ufology research, which included investigating reports of alien abductions years before the subject saturated the public mind.

In short, we had been constantly talking about weird stuff for a long time. Perhaps a strange spark on a Saturday in the wilderness ignited a brief mental brushfire in both of our minds.

Another possibility is that somebody drugged us, but we hadn’t stopped to eat or drink on our way out to Boar’s Tusk, and we’d only consumed soft drinks from sealed cans stored in a small cooler.

I’ve decided I’ll never determine what happened.

But I’ll tell you this: I’ve never returned to Boar’s Tusk.