Now the government calls them UAPs and holds press conferences.

Belief in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) for decades occupied the exclusive domain of conspiracy theorists, late-night AM radio callers, and guys who stored canned beans in underground bunkers.

Back then, if you talked about flying saucers in public, people looked at you the same way they’d look at someone claiming Bigfoot stole their lawnmower.

Today they call them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), which sounds a lot more respectable and government-funded. Somewhere along the line, UFOs got a promotion.

I’ll admit it. My fascination started when I read Erich von Däniken and his wildly popular book “Chariots of the Gods?” Von Däniken argued that extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth since ancient times and that many of the “angels” described in holy writings like the Bible and Torah may have been visitors from somewhere beyond our galaxy.

Was it far-fetched? Absolutely.

Did teenage me eat it up like Buford gas station beef jerky on a Wyoming road trip? Also absolutely.

I tend to trust my own observations more than theories. That brings me to one unforgettable weekend in 1980.

I was reading the front page of the “Casper Star-Tribune” when I came across a story about strange UFO sightings at the Morton Pass area along Wyoming Highway 34 between Wheatland and Laramie. The property belonged to Pat McGuire and his family.

The sketch by Marina Wormus illustrated the story by Greg Bean.

Now this wasn’t your standard “my cousin saw lights after six Coors Banquets” kind of story.

McGuire claimed he’d been abducted multiple times. According to reports, hypnotic regression sessions conducted by Professor Leo Sprinkle at the University of Wyoming revealed encounters with alien beings who supposedly instructed him to drill a water well on otherwise useless land.

The result? A gusher that provided enough to irrigate alfalfa fields.

No UFO story is complete without at least one detail that makes everybody tilt their head sideways. McGuire flew an Israeli flag over the well because he said the Star of David adorned the aliens’ belt buckles.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Naturally, I talked a few friends from Gillette to load into a van and headed south in search of extraterrestrials.

We camped out on the property and, sure enough, saw strange lights moving in the distance over the prairie sky. Were they spacecraft? Military exercises? Reflections? Atmospheric weirdness?

I’ll tell you this. When you’re standing in the middle of the Wyoming night with nothing around but wind, sagebrush, and stars the size of dinner plates, your imagination becomes very open-minded.

I’d call it a close encounter of the “pretty darn interesting” kind.

Over the years, I’ve become less interested in little green men and more interested in the spiritual side of the phenomenon.

Oddly enough, evangelist Billy Graham wrote in his book “Angels: God’s Secret Agents,” speculated that extraterrestrials could be part of God’s creation.

I’ve wondered if what ancient people described as angels might overlap with what modern people describe as UFO encounters.

It’s harder to laugh the subject off now that the Department of Defense has released footage and reports from military pilots describing UAP. When fighter pilots start saying, “Yeah, we saw something weird moving at impossible speeds,” suddenly the old UFO crowd doesn’t seem quite so crazy.

Well, slightly less crazy.

I still don’t know what I saw over Morton Pass all those years ago, but it made for one heck of a Wyoming weekend.

Unlike the aliens, the memories have never disappeared.