UTAH'S MYSTERIOUS GADIANTON CANYON

One of the strangest Highway Space Warp (HSW) cases took place in southeastern Utah near the railroad crossing of Modena, on the edge of the Escalante Desert.
There's a slickrock canyon just north of Modena that bears the name of Gadianton. It's a name that brings a shudder to God-fearing Latter-Day Saints.

"Among the freighters who hauled supplies to Pioche (Nevada) in the seventies (1870s--J.T.) there grew up a legend that a rocky gorge near the Nevada Line was haunted by the Gadianton robbers, a terroristic brotherhood which the Book of Mormon explains as having sprung up among the Nephites and Lamanites in the century before Christ."

The Gadiantons were a mysterious sect of assassins quite similar to the Bruder Schweigen of Germany or the Crna Ruka of Yugoslavia.

"Wide-eyed freighters told tales of rocks closing the way, and of the canyon folding up to entrap them."

Eventually the old Gadianton tales were forgotten in Utah's Iron County. Until May of 1972, when four coeds from Southern Utah University (SUU) were driving back to their dorm in Cedar City after spending Saturday at a local rodeo in Pioche. (All names have been changed to protect the witnesses' confidentiality--J.T.)

Janna North had the wheel of her father's 1971 Chevrolet Nova, and Carol Abbott was in the passenger seat. Sitting in the back seat were Lisa Rochefort and Bethany Gordon. It was after 10 p.m. when the girls crossed the Utah-Nevada state line nine miles (14 kilometers) east of Modena. And they were anxious to get back to the campus before their housemother, Mrs. Mortensen, locked the dorm doors.

That stretch of Utah Highway 56 is pretty desolate, all sand and sagebrush and ocotillo and Spanish bayonet, with the red sandstone bluffs on the northern horizon. So the girls were pretty happy when they finally spotted the Union Pacific railroad crossing at Modena. But just past the rails, Janna noticed something strange. Two sets of blacktop highway headed off into the desert--one veered sharply to the southeast, the other shooting northeast toward the canyon country further north.

"Which one do we take?" asked Carol.

"Left," Janna said. She knew that Cedar City was 46 miles (73 kilometers) to the northeast, and she guessed that the canyon road would bring them home much sooner.

Five minutes later, the Chevy entered the red-rock canyon. Janna, who had been chatting with her friends, suddenly noticed that the car's headlights were shining more brightly on the pavement. Looking closer, she let out a gasp. The white centerline was gone. Instead of black asphalt, they were driving on white cement..

"Janna, up ahead!" Carol exclaimed.

Janna gasped. The highway ended abruptly at a rocky cliff face. Janna stepped down hard on the brake pedal. Fishtailing slightly, the Chevy screeched to a stop in front of the cliff.

"Oh, great! A dead end!" Putting the gear into reverse, Janna swung the car's nose around. "You'd think they'd put up a few warning signs."

"Now we've got to go all the way back to Modena," Bethany complained.

"We're never going to make curfew," Lisa said.

"We'll make good time once we're back on the state highway," Janna assured them.

Tense minutes passed. Janna began to feel uneasy. They were still rolling along, hemmed in by red canyon walls. But they should have been back out in the open desert by this time.

The canyon gradually gave way to open country. The girls gasped. Instead of moonlit desert, they saw grain fields on the right and a large like, with stands of ponderosa pine, on the left.

Carol looked around in awe. "This sure ain't Modena!"

"We must've gotten turned around back there," Janna said, her gaze darting back and forth. "Where the hell are we?"

Up ahead Janna spied a roadhouse (tavern--J.T.) and an adjacent parking lot. It seemed to have a neon sign, but she couldn't red it. What should have been letters were brightly-lit squiggles and curlycues. Some men came out of the building.

"There are some guys," Carol said.

Bethany let out a giggle. "Are they cute?"

"Let's find out." Lisa began rolling down the rear passenger window.

"Lisa! We don't have time for this," Janna said.

"Relax!" Hastily she touched up her lipstick. "I'm only going to ask them how to get back to the highway."

As Janna slowed down, she noticed a good deal of consternation among the men. As if they'd been startled by some unknown animal. Sticking her head out the window, Lisa said, "Hi! We're--" And she let out a terrified scream.

"Lisa! What--!?" Janna turned in her seat.

"Get out of here!" the girl screamed, frantically rolling up the window. "Punch it, Jana!"

Bethany shrieked, "Step on it!"

Tires sitting sand, the Chevy zoomed away from the building. Janna stepped down hard on the gas pedal. The lake flew by on her left.

"Oh, my God! They're coming after us!" Bethany shouted. "Janna, faster!"

Janna glanced in her rear-view mirror, and what she saw turned her blood to ice. They were being chased, but not by any vehicle that had ever been built in Detroit.

Four queer-looking automobiles followed in their wake. Egg-shaped vehicles mounted on tricycle wheels. That is, with two large wheels in the front and a smaller wheel in the rear. A single bright white headlight shone from the front of each pursuing "car." They made a strange whirring or buzzing sound as they rolled along.

"Janna, go faster! They're gaining on us!"

Ahead the road led back into a red-rock canyon. Janna's Chevy plunged into it at 80 miles per hour. The road was so narrow, it seemed to hem them in. The Chevy's tires kicked up a billowing cloud of dust. They could no longer see their pursuers.

Minutes later, they roared out of the canyon, back into the familiar desert. All at once, the road vanished. The headlights showed nothing but sagebrush and ocotillo. The Chevy bucked and jostled like a wild bronc. Janna hit the brakes. Too late! The car sideskidded down an arroyo and came to rest at the bottom.

Shaking uncontrollably, the girls emerged from the car. Miraculously they were unhurt. The Chevy took the worst of it, with three flat tires, numerous dings in the front bumper and a missing hubcap. Jenna took one look and clapped both hands to her forehead. "Oh, no-no-no! My dad's going to kill me!"

Lisa, however, was near-hysterical. She sat on the ground, hugging the knees of her bell- bottom blue jeans, weeping and moaning, She kept mumbling, "They-they weren't human..."

The girls stayed with the car until sunrise. Then they walked a couple of miles due south. Boy, were they glad when they found the familiar blacktop of Highway 56. An hour later, they flagged down a cruiser of the Utah Highway Patrol and told their story.

Trooper Vic Lundquist, who investigated the case, noted several circumstances that were never adequately explained.

(1) There were no tire tracks showing where the Chevy had left Highway 56 in Modena.

(2) Tire tracks from the wrecked Chevy extended only 200 yards back into the desert and ended abruptly.

(3) No one could explain how the Chevy had gotten nearly two miles north of Highway 56 without leaving any physical trace of its passage through the rough desert terrain.

(4) Although volunteers searched diligently, no trace of the Chevy's right front hubcap was ever found.

If Utah's Gadianton Canyon is, as some people claim, a gateway to another dimension, then perhaps Janna's missing hubcap is a prime exhibit--an "alien artifact"--on display in a museum on that parallel Earth.

Astronomers are finding a variety of planets orbiting distant stars in the galaxy. Image credit: German Aerospace Center (DLR)

The ghost town of Glastenbury and mysterious Glastenbury Mountain where so many have disappeared lie just a few just a few miles northeast of Bennington , Vt.