Llano Estacado

It was 485 years ago today on October 20th, 1541.

The famed Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, in a letter to the King of Spain, became the first man to describe the vast, or as some of you would say, Llano Estacado, the Llano Estacado, the Llano Estacado, the state plains, the southern extension of the high plains of North America.

is a high mesa lying south of the Canadian River in northwest Texas and northeast New Mexico.

Coronado had been appointed in 1540 to lead an exposition to the seven cities of Cibola, wondrous tales of which had been brought to Mexico by Cabeza de Vaca.

Coronado found no gold at Cibola in western New Mexico, but he was... led on by stories of Kivira, a region far to the east.

It was during his search for Kivira that Coronado came upon the Llano Estacado, which he described thusly, I reached some plains so vast that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues, with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea.

There was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.

Future explorers echoed his impressions of the region.

It is not too late yet, and if some few would heed his words and mine, these pages would not be written in vain.

I heard once of a man banished from New England to the Llano Estacado, the great summer-bitten plains of Texas.

While riding alone among his cows over miles of yucca and sage, he kept in touch with the world through the poetry he recited to himself.

His favorite, I remember, was Whittier's Randolph of Roanoke.

I would also say get out in the land.

Go to the Llano Estacado, go to the Piney Woods, go to Montana, um, and, and stand in a rut that was made by the Western Trail, you know, uh, west of McCook, Nebraska, where some of the trails you can still see the ruts.

Southwest of Dodge City, you can still see the ruts.

Go be in it and touch it, because spirit lives in places.

Picture this.

You're somewhere over West Texas, maybe eight thousand feet, the afternoon sun laying long shadows across the Llano Estacado.

Below you, the earth is flat and tan and enormous.

The roads run straight for forty, fifty miles before they bother to turn.

Six motorists, a sheriff, and even firefighters all reporting engines stalling under an unexplained egg-shaped light that hovered over Highway two ninety in Levelland back in November nineteen fifty-seven.

Back in early November nineteen fifty-seven, a stretch of highway outside the town of Levelland, Texas, a modest city on the Llano Estacado, became the unlikely theater for one of the most meticulously documented UAP incidents of that decade.

The evening of the second saw six separate reports from motorists, law enforcement officers, and even firefighters, glowing lights hovering over their cars, engines stalling mid-turn, headlights extinguishing, radio silence, all while a large egg-shaped or torpedo-like object hovered just above the roadway.

By dawn on the third, the scene had doubled with additional sightings of what some witnesses described as a craft resting briefly against a road before launching at high speed toward the horizon.

Another angle worth mentioning is the potential influence of local folklore.

Lubbock's proximity to the Llano Estacado and its history of meteor sightings could predispose witnesses toward interpreting unusual lights as supernatural.

From a historical perspective, it's clear that the 1950s were an era of heightened fear of foreign espionage and rapid technological change, which framed public reception of such phenomena.

The Lubbock lights unfolded just weeks after the first Cold War-era U.S. Navy aerial combat exercises, making any unidentified object automatically suspect to both civilians and defense officials.

Quanah is a war chief born of two worlds, the son of a fierce Comanche warrior and a captured white woman.

But out on the Llano Estacado, he is the undisputed master of the southern plains.

He rides bareback, black hair braided and whipping in the wind, a war bonnet trailing behind him, wielding a six-shooter in one hand and a heavy, brutal steel machete in the other.

The buffalo hunters unleash a devastating volley.

Yeah.

It's just pretty, it's a pretty...

The, you know, the Llano Estacado, where the Kwahadi, which is, you know, Quanah Parker's tribe, they were sort of, like, among the Comanches who were already, like, the most feared tribe in the North American continent.

They were, they were even feared among the Comanches, this specific tribe, the Kwahadi.