HOOPER, Colo.  “I like humans, they’re fun,” Judy Messoline said as she showed a visitor through her vortex garden, which psychics have said contains not just one, but two separate portals to a parallel universe.

Many of the humans who come to Ms. Messoline’s U.F.O. Watchtower, hard by the dueling vortexes, may be fun, but they are also wounded. About 95 percent, by her estimate  and she makes a point of asking  have experienced something, a shudder in the fabric of the ordinary, the sighting of an unidentified flying object that to one degree or another has haunted them and drawn them to this otherwise empty spot in south-central Colorado. Having fun in thinking about extraterrestrials, she said, is usually bound up with something deeper right here on the home planet.

“The world needs a place where people can go to talk about their experiences and not be laughed at,” she said.

People do laugh here. One of Ms. Messoline’s principles in building the Watchtower a decade ago, in an attempt to raise cash as her cattle ranch collapsed in economic ruin, was that U.F.O.-spotting should be a hoot, and whenever possible, a party.