Ride the 37th Parallel: America’s UFO Highway

A brother-sister team of paranormal researchers has found a pattern in the locations of anomalous phenomena, strewn along an east-west line following the 37th parallel, a formation they’re dubbing America’s "Paranormal Freeway". This latitude line is easy to pick out on a map, as it lies on the southern borders of Colorado, Kansas and Utah, and correspondingly the northern borders of Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma. The phenomena involved along 37º north include cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, ghost hauntings, and government installations such as Area 51, along with numerous Native American sacred sites and underwater caves.

Originally investigating cattle mutilations in Colorado, former deputy sheriff Chuck Zukowski began to notice an odd pattern emerging: "Back in 2006 I was looking at my cattle mutilation investigations – there were huge similarities between them all – most of them were laying on their right side, they’re laying east to west and then I noticed that lots of them were on the 37 degree latitude."

Zukowski contacted his sister, Debbie Zeigelmeyer, the state director for Missouri’s MUFON branch, about the pattern. Zeigelmeyer found the same pattern amongst her reports, with many of the sites involving cattle mutilations or UFO sightings occurring along the 37th. Investigating further, the pair began to uncover even more sites following this paranormal highway: in addition to numerous cattle mutilation and high-profile UFO sightings, the site of the 1948 UFO crash in Aztec, New Mexico, occurred on the 37th; classified test facility Area 51 is also along the line; as well as Dulce Base, an alleged underground extraterrestrial base, reportedly located near Dulce, NM.

But is this simply a matter of Zukowski and Zeigelmeyer simply concentrating on cases along this narrow corridor? In 2011, Open Minds contributor Alejandro Rojas made the same connection, and analyzed the number of anomalous reports along the 37th parallel, applying them against population data for the involved states. He concluded that the number of incidents along the Paranormal Freeway were disproportionately high.

Zukowski and Zeigelmeyer’s research has been incorporated into Ben Mezrich’s 2016 book, The 37th Parallel, and was the subject of an episode of the Science Channel’s Unexplained Files. While the reason for the disproportionate number of reports along 37º north remains elusive, Zukowski thinks that this may have to do with secret military bases in the area, although this connection is simply speculative. Regardless, the pattern, according to Zukowski and Zeigelmeyer, is evident.

"The bottom line is the 37th latitude is like a UFO highway or paranormal highway across the continent," concludes Zukowski. "We seem to think that this highway is a major highway that these crafts use – they seem to exit and enter here."