Stories about the creatures began popping up all over the Midwest as early as November last year. Photographs and video were next – spreading the rumors of alien visitation all over the world via Youtube and Flickr. Experts scoffed, sci-fi fans rejoiced, skeptics laughed, some religious groups cried armageddon.
Then, five hikers in Arizona’s Ramsey Canyon Preserve used their wits – and a large waterproof blanket – to end the controversy. And in so doing, they laid claim to the find of the past two millennia.
Like the rest of us, these five students from the University of Arizona had heard the stories. They’d read the news feeds. They’d squinted at the pictures online, trying to see what the captions claimed was there. They’d laughed at Jay Leno’s take on the whole alien scenario. They’d laughed at David Letterman’s monologue about alien visitation. Two of them had even blogged about the ‘alien nonsense’ on Facebook.
But when they woke up on the second morning of their trek into the national park, what they saw put them among the ranks of the believers. What they did set them apart.
“I probably blinked a billion times,” says Andrew Ragnarris, 20, from Phoenix, the first of the group to awaken just before dawn on Tuesday, April 2. “We had camped on top of a little bluff, and I woke early to watch the sunrise. I looked down and couldn’t believe that I was awake and seeing what I was seeing. It was RC – real and right there below our camp.
RC is the nickname the vacationing college students affectionately give to the creature whose capture put their names and faces in newspapers and feeds around the world . Ostensibly, the initials stand for Ramsey Canyon, the location of the capture, but also for ‘Radical Creature’ and ‘Recreation Crasher’ according to the five friends who delivered it alive to stunned park rangers with the help of a summoned Newschannel 9 helicopter Tuesday afternoon.
Ragnarris describes his initial reaction: “I kept seeing it – big, green, furry – similar to the pictures and sketches I’d seen on the net, enough to tell me that some of those stories must be true. But others are way off. RC didn’t have spines and alien battle armor and the rest. It was totally alive and alien, but just moving around, poking at plants and rocks, just below where we’d slept. More like ET than Alien,” he says, referencing the Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott classic alien encounter films. RC was right there, plain as day. And it had no idea we were there.”
Ragnarris credits their lack of discovery by the alien to his father, a seasoned hiker and camper whose love for the wildlife and landscape of Ramsey Canyon Preserve inspired the group of friends to spend their Spring Break roughing it instead of on the beach.
“Dad dared us to really go back to nature on this trip. I mean, it’s not the typical spring break, but we were stoked about it. We brought our cells in case of emergency and our cameras, but that’s about it. No mp3 players, no PSP, no GPS. We planned on becoming part of the canyons. We even brought jerky and dried fruit so we wouldn’t need to have fires. We really were trying to blend in, which is maybe why RC didn’t see us. It gave us enough time to think.”
His friends also have another meaning for the alien’s nickname: ‘Ragnarris’s Conquest’ – but Ragnarris insists on sharing the spotlight. According to him, all five college students played crucial parts in humanity’s capture of the world’s first alien life form. However, he admits that he was the first among his friends to spot the creature.
Plus, he had the presence of mind to do what others who claimed similar encounters failed to do. He quietly awakened his friends rather than clicking away on his digital camera. He explains his actions this way: “I knew that pictures weren’t enough – I mean, it’s just way too easy to edit photos now. I didn’t want to end up being another wacko on Letterman with blurry pictures. No one trusts pictures anymore,” he says, “I knew I wanted my friends to witness what I was seeing, and I knew that I needed their help.”
Tracey Swain, 19, from New Castle, Montana, was the first awakened by Andrew. “Of course, I didn’t believe him until I saw RC. Then, it was surreal. I kept looking around for cameras. I felt like I was on Punk’d or one of those prank shows. But it was real!” She immediately helped rouse their sleeping companions.
Maggie Carpenter, 19, from Bradsford, and Chas Dierra, 20, from Carlsbad, woke next. Dierra describes his excitement: “I’m a huge Stargate fan, and I know it’s cheesy, but I love Star Trek, too – I’ve watched every episode of every series, even Enterprise. I play all the games, so I’m a sci-fi geek, I guess, but for fun only.” The third year Accounting student with a 4.0 average claims that he had always kept his leisure interests separate from his real world plans. “Up to the second, I looked down and saw RC thought the whole alien visitation business on the news was a load of crap. It was all fiction and fantasy to me before that. Seeing that the alien was real was a shock, but in a good way! It kind of brought everything together – the real and the unreal. It was wild!”
Carpenter describes a very different reaction upon seeing the alien for the first time. “I was terrified,” she admits. “Complete paralyzing terror. I’d read some of the crackpot attack stories and laughed at them, but when I saw it was real, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I was that scared. I wanted to call the Army or FBI right away.”
Her friends, however, calmed her down and changed her mind. “Maggie was really freaking out!” reports Dartanion “Gouda” Waggon, 21, from Mylers Point, AK, the oldest of the group and the last to be woken up. “She was shaking and almost in shock. I know she was close to screaming, but we got her back down to reality. We reminded her about the government conspiracy spin on the aliens and brought up lasers and satellite tracking. She’s a Psych major and into the whole Green Party things back on campus, so that made her forget about calling anybody and get serious. That’s when Andy told us about his plan.”
High school wrestling captain, third-year Corporate Business major, and amateur rodeo bulldogger, Andrew Ragnarris based his plan on what he knew best – incapacitating and controlling something larger than himself. “I knew that we had to act quickly and not act scared,” he says. “That’s key to any struggle, physical or financial – don’t let the opponent psych you out.”
When asked about whether or not he was scared, the college junior responds, “I’ve wrestled bulls and even a few guys bigger than this thing, but I wasn’t sure what it was going to do.” He adds, “But being scared inside and going on is different from being scared all over and just running away. I knew we had a one-time shot at something huge, so I wasn’t going to let us run. I needed to find something to give us the edge we needed, and we had it thanks to Tracey.”
He is referring to an item brought by Zoology major Tracey Swain that inspired Andrew’s plan and guaranteed the group’s success. “I wanted to sketch some of the rarer species in the canyons, like the lemon lily and the elegant trogon, and I didn’t want my pads and pastels getting wet,” she says, explaining why she brought a waterproof blanket in addition to the small but weather-resistant tent each hiker had in his or her pack. “My dad actually uses it to protect his motorcycle when he hauls it to races, so it’s pretty big plus it’s tough. Gouda and Chad made fun of me the whole trip because it takes forever to unwrap my art supplies, but I wanted my drawings protected in case there were flash floods or something.”
She didn’t count on confronting and capturing an alien being when she packed that blanket, but that is exactly what her friend Andrew’s plan called for. Just a few short minutes after awakening his fellow students, he led them in a surprise attack that rendered the alien they dubbed RC unconscious, completely immobilized, and unhurt. Carpenter then used her cell phone to report their find, not to park officials, not to the military, not even to the government. She sent some phone pictures of the victorious group with the swaddled alien to a sorority sister with an internship at KSAZ - FOX Channel 10. In little more than an hour, a KSAZ helicopter arrived to carry the students and their exotic cargo to a press conference at the Ramsey Canyon Preserve Welcome Center.
Although it was ultimately Ragnarris’s planning and Swain’s preparedness that gave the five university students what they needed to capture the alien they dubbed RC, the group also had Andrew Ragnarris’s wrestling experience (with both humans and steers), Gouda Waggon’s strength (he plays nose tackle for Arizona Wildcats), Chas Dierra’s strategy (he ranks among the top PvP players in Star Wars Galaxies online gaming, Swain’s knowledge of comparative anatomy (she used the alien’s body type to decide how to safely incapacitate the creature) and Carpenter’s willingness to support her friends (she credits Ragnarris’s confidence as inspiring her to overcome her fear). This unique blending of humanity’s diverse skills and abilities gave these young hikers the edge that has put their names in the world’s history books.
Then, five hikers in Arizona’s Ramsey Canyon Preserve used their wits – and a large waterproof blanket – to end the controversy. And in so doing, they laid claim to the find of the past two millennia.
Like the rest of us, these five students from the University of Arizona had heard the stories. They’d read the news feeds. They’d squinted at the pictures online, trying to see what the captions claimed was there. They’d laughed at Jay Leno’s take on the whole alien scenario. They’d laughed at David Letterman’s monologue about alien visitation. Two of them had even blogged about the ‘alien nonsense’ on Facebook.
But when they woke up on the second morning of their trek into the national park, what they saw put them among the ranks of the believers. What they did set them apart.
“I probably blinked a billion times,” says Andrew Ragnarris, 20, from Phoenix, the first of the group to awaken just before dawn on Tuesday, April 2. “We had camped on top of a little bluff, and I woke early to watch the sunrise. I looked down and couldn’t believe that I was awake and seeing what I was seeing. It was RC – real and right there below our camp.
RC is the nickname the vacationing college students affectionately give to the creature whose capture put their names and faces in newspapers and feeds around the world . Ostensibly, the initials stand for Ramsey Canyon, the location of the capture, but also for ‘Radical Creature’ and ‘Recreation Crasher’ according to the five friends who delivered it alive to stunned park rangers with the help of a summoned Newschannel 9 helicopter Tuesday afternoon.
Ragnarris describes his initial reaction: “I kept seeing it – big, green, furry – similar to the pictures and sketches I’d seen on the net, enough to tell me that some of those stories must be true. But others are way off. RC didn’t have spines and alien battle armor and the rest. It was totally alive and alien, but just moving around, poking at plants and rocks, just below where we’d slept. More like ET than Alien,” he says, referencing the Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott classic alien encounter films. RC was right there, plain as day. And it had no idea we were there.”
Ragnarris credits their lack of discovery by the alien to his father, a seasoned hiker and camper whose love for the wildlife and landscape of Ramsey Canyon Preserve inspired the group of friends to spend their Spring Break roughing it instead of on the beach.
“Dad dared us to really go back to nature on this trip. I mean, it’s not the typical spring break, but we were stoked about it. We brought our cells in case of emergency and our cameras, but that’s about it. No mp3 players, no PSP, no GPS. We planned on becoming part of the canyons. We even brought jerky and dried fruit so we wouldn’t need to have fires. We really were trying to blend in, which is maybe why RC didn’t see us. It gave us enough time to think.”
His friends also have another meaning for the alien’s nickname: ‘Ragnarris’s Conquest’ – but Ragnarris insists on sharing the spotlight. According to him, all five college students played crucial parts in humanity’s capture of the world’s first alien life form. However, he admits that he was the first among his friends to spot the creature.
Plus, he had the presence of mind to do what others who claimed similar encounters failed to do. He quietly awakened his friends rather than clicking away on his digital camera. He explains his actions this way: “I knew that pictures weren’t enough – I mean, it’s just way too easy to edit photos now. I didn’t want to end up being another wacko on Letterman with blurry pictures. No one trusts pictures anymore,” he says, “I knew I wanted my friends to witness what I was seeing, and I knew that I needed their help.”
Tracey Swain, 19, from New Castle, Montana, was the first awakened by Andrew. “Of course, I didn’t believe him until I saw RC. Then, it was surreal. I kept looking around for cameras. I felt like I was on Punk’d or one of those prank shows. But it was real!” She immediately helped rouse their sleeping companions.
Maggie Carpenter, 19, from Bradsford, and Chas Dierra, 20, from Carlsbad, woke next. Dierra describes his excitement: “I’m a huge Stargate fan, and I know it’s cheesy, but I love Star Trek, too – I’ve watched every episode of every series, even Enterprise. I play all the games, so I’m a sci-fi geek, I guess, but for fun only.” The third year Accounting student with a 4.0 average claims that he had always kept his leisure interests separate from his real world plans. “Up to the second, I looked down and saw RC thought the whole alien visitation business on the news was a load of crap. It was all fiction and fantasy to me before that. Seeing that the alien was real was a shock, but in a good way! It kind of brought everything together – the real and the unreal. It was wild!”
Carpenter describes a very different reaction upon seeing the alien for the first time. “I was terrified,” she admits. “Complete paralyzing terror. I’d read some of the crackpot attack stories and laughed at them, but when I saw it was real, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I was that scared. I wanted to call the Army or FBI right away.”
Her friends, however, calmed her down and changed her mind. “Maggie was really freaking out!” reports Dartanion “Gouda” Waggon, 21, from Mylers Point, AK, the oldest of the group and the last to be woken up. “She was shaking and almost in shock. I know she was close to screaming, but we got her back down to reality. We reminded her about the government conspiracy spin on the aliens and brought up lasers and satellite tracking. She’s a Psych major and into the whole Green Party things back on campus, so that made her forget about calling anybody and get serious. That’s when Andy told us about his plan.”
High school wrestling captain, third-year Corporate Business major, and amateur rodeo bulldogger, Andrew Ragnarris based his plan on what he knew best – incapacitating and controlling something larger than himself. “I knew that we had to act quickly and not act scared,” he says. “That’s key to any struggle, physical or financial – don’t let the opponent psych you out.”
When asked about whether or not he was scared, the college junior responds, “I’ve wrestled bulls and even a few guys bigger than this thing, but I wasn’t sure what it was going to do.” He adds, “But being scared inside and going on is different from being scared all over and just running away. I knew we had a one-time shot at something huge, so I wasn’t going to let us run. I needed to find something to give us the edge we needed, and we had it thanks to Tracey.”
He is referring to an item brought by Zoology major Tracey Swain that inspired Andrew’s plan and guaranteed the group’s success. “I wanted to sketch some of the rarer species in the canyons, like the lemon lily and the elegant trogon, and I didn’t want my pads and pastels getting wet,” she says, explaining why she brought a waterproof blanket in addition to the small but weather-resistant tent each hiker had in his or her pack. “My dad actually uses it to protect his motorcycle when he hauls it to races, so it’s pretty big plus it’s tough. Gouda and Chad made fun of me the whole trip because it takes forever to unwrap my art supplies, but I wanted my drawings protected in case there were flash floods or something.”
She didn’t count on confronting and capturing an alien being when she packed that blanket, but that is exactly what her friend Andrew’s plan called for. Just a few short minutes after awakening his fellow students, he led them in a surprise attack that rendered the alien they dubbed RC unconscious, completely immobilized, and unhurt. Carpenter then used her cell phone to report their find, not to park officials, not to the military, not even to the government. She sent some phone pictures of the victorious group with the swaddled alien to a sorority sister with an internship at KSAZ - FOX Channel 10. In little more than an hour, a KSAZ helicopter arrived to carry the students and their exotic cargo to a press conference at the Ramsey Canyon Preserve Welcome Center.
Although it was ultimately Ragnarris’s planning and Swain’s preparedness that gave the five university students what they needed to capture the alien they dubbed RC, the group also had Andrew Ragnarris’s wrestling experience (with both humans and steers), Gouda Waggon’s strength (he plays nose tackle for Arizona Wildcats), Chas Dierra’s strategy (he ranks among the top PvP players in Star Wars Galaxies online gaming, Swain’s knowledge of comparative anatomy (she used the alien’s body type to decide how to safely incapacitate the creature) and Carpenter’s willingness to support her friends (she credits Ragnarris’s confidence as inspiring her to overcome her fear). This unique blending of humanity’s diverse skills and abilities gave these young hikers the edge that has put their names in the world’s history books.
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