Alien files?: Bozeman UFO experiencers aren't buying it

For Ivy McKeehan, the visits began in childhood and never stopped. For Nathan Eastin, it was a one-time sighting in his backyard at night. Both Bozeman residents don’t need the government to tell them that what they saw was real, and definitely not human.

McKeehan and Eastin are not alone. A November 2025 YouGov survey found that nearly half of Americans believe aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth, a striking shift from when the perspective got experiencers laughed out of the room.

In Montana, that credulity can be easier to come by than elsewhere. The state ranks second in the country for sightings per capita, according to the National UFO Reporting Center. Bozeman is the state’s leading sighting city.

Skeptics might point out that the Centers for Disease Control also ranks Bozeman the drunkest city in the country, and leave it at that. McKeehan has a different theory for why there are so many local sightings. Montana is home to 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, the largest nuclear missile complex in the Western hemisphere.

“A lot of my experiences happened in Great Falls, which I think that’s because of how many nukes are there,” McKeehan said. “It would make sense if that kind of traffic applied to the whole state, and then Bozeman is just the people who are more likely to report.”

UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base date back to the 1960s, including a 1967 incident in which former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas said several missiles went inoperative while base security reported a glowing red object hovering overhead. Last year, a peer-reviewed study published in Scientific Reports found a statistically significant correlation between historical UAP sightings and nuclear weapons tests.

“I firmly believe that the governments of all major countries of the world have been interacting with these aliens for a long time,” McKeehan said. “I think (aliens) have been ready to disclose themselves for a hot minute, and I think the timeline depends on how crazy humans want to get about certain things, like nukes.”

McKeehan said she has been having visits from non-human entities since she was 7-years-old, long before she knew anything about Malmstrom or the research.

Sometimes they come in dreams. Sometimes they are more physical. She points to a mark on her arm she says was left by a probe when McKeehan was a small child.

McKeehan describes the entities as closer to familiarity than fear, as if she already knew them. The relationship, she said, has been a source of healing for her, and she believes disclosure would extend that to the world. Their preoccupation with nuclear weapons, she thinks, is proof enough of where they stand.

“I really feel strongly that there is a very benevolent alien presence in my life, and in the lives of people that I know and I don’t think they’re really here for things like war,” McKeehan said. “I think that’s part of why more powerful organizations might want to make us scared to like recognize that they’re here to help.”

No one with firsthand knowledge has confirmed the reason, but several government whistleblowers claimed a cover-up.

In 2023, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath before Congress that the U.S. has concealed a multi-decade program to retrieve and reverse-engineer non-human craft, that non-human biologics were recovered alongside some of them, and that people within the government were harmed to keep it quiet. Former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo, who ran the Defense Department’s UFO investigation program, made similar claims.

“Excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public,” Elizondo said in his 2024 Congressional testimony. “All to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos.”

The hearings represented a turning point, a crack in decades of official silence or explanation of what increasing numbers of people were reporting. For many in the experiencer and disclosure communities, the hearings fell short of the full transparency they waited for.

Then, earlier this year, it seemed like some of those answers might finally be coming.

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life,” President Trump wrote in a TruthSocial post in February.

So far, the Pentagon has released several rounds of records and information, including declassified military videos, FBI eyewitness reports, and a first-person account from an intelligence officer who said an encounter left him “virtually speechless.”

The third drop came in the form of a sleek, sci-fi-styled government website. But the statement featured on the homepage of aliens.gov had nothing to do with non-human intelligence. It was about undocumented immigrants, a cornerstone of Trump’s second term.

“President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation,” the website reads. “The truth is no longer out there. It is right here. Right now.”

McKeehan hadn’t been closely following the so-called release of the UFO files. But scrolling through the newest iteration of the website, realizing the Trump administration appeared to be using disclosure as a bait-and-switch to point fingers at immigrants, all she could do was sigh.

“That’s actually really sick,” McKeehan said.

Eastin doesn’t have the long-term relationship with extraterrestrials that McKeehan claims. His experience with the phenomenon begins and ends with one sighting in his backyard from several years prior.

But he was always been drawn to the topic, and watching the government use disclosure as another cudgel against immigrants felt, to him, like a return to the mockery that has long surrounded the phenomenon.

“They’re just laughing in all of our faces,” Eastin said.

But whatever the government thinks of the subject, what Eastin saw in his backyard years ago was not something he can laugh off.

“I have a nice empty space in my backyard here in Bozeman. So when I go out at night I get to see a lot of stars,” Eastin said. “I was out back one night and I saw a triangle, but it was just lights. It was massive, it took up a large portion of the sky. Then suddenly it started to rotate counter clockwise.”

When he realized the lights were not simply stars arranged in an unusual pattern, Eastin said he felt frozen in place.

“I didn’t know what to do. I was just completely blown away and beside myself. I knew it wasn’t normal and I could feel it that this was something I’m not supposed to see,” Eastin said. “As I was beginning to really understand what I was looking at, it just slowly faded away and all three of the lights in unison faded out. That was it.”

To this day, Eastin isn’t sure if he saw an alien craft or, instead, perhaps some classified military technology in its testing phase.

“In the state of Montana it makes so much sense that they’d be testing these things in a very public area,” Eastin said. “It’s public to us in the valley, but considering the rest of the country, this is a pretty desolate place.”

Eastin was not alone the night he saw the triangle. His friend Carl Anderson was inside when Eastin came to the door, pulling him out to see whatever was hovering over the yard. By the time Anderson got outside, it was gone.

But the experience stuck with him, too. A Bozeman resident for 15 years, Anderson’s academic background spans clinical psychology, biochemistry and astrobiology, drawn together by a single through line.

“My endeavor was to study consciousness,” Anderson said. “Answer the questions of what is consciousness? What is life?”

It is a question he thinks is inseparable from the UFO conversation. He does not think Eastin, or the scores of others who have reported encountering the phenomenon, are making it up. But what people perceive in those moments, and how they make sense of it afterward, may say as much about the architecture of human consciousness as it does about whatever is actually out there.

“In medieval times, they were seeing these fairies, and that’s just how they conceptualized it. Now, in modern times, the technological era, we are seeing them as aliens in advanced ships,” Anderson said. “But they actually might all be the same thing.”

Anderson has never had a clear experience of his own. But for the past several years he has organized First Contact Con, a Bozeman gathering that celebrates the fictional date in the Star Trek universe when humans and extraterrestrials make contact for the first time.It draws experiencers and academics alike, people who have spent years sitting with these questions from every possible angle.

Among that crowd, Anderson said, the release of the UFO files has not been met with excitement. It has been met with something closer to disgust.

Not because the files themselves are unwelcome, but because many of those he knows see the whole enterprise as a way to placate those seeking long-hidden answers while the Trump administration continues to withhold the full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and whatever those might reveal about the people connected to him.

“Everyone’s just kind of like, 'Yeah, sure, we know there’s aliens,'” Anderson said. “But prosecute these pedophiles. Let’s quit trying to distract.”

In Washington, the political games will continue. But in Bozeman, those who have spent a lifetime waiting for answers, and those who already believe they have them, will keep looking up.