The designated meeting spot along West Sedona’s stretch of State Route 89A couldn’t be more normal: a souvenir shop next to a gas station selling coffee mugs, cactus candy and T-shirts featuring red rock
silhouettes. I wonder if I’m in the right place, given the weirdness of my reason for being there.
I walk up to a man standing expectantly outside the store. He’s wearing a leather newsboy cap, a trimmed mustache and tennis shoes tinted with Sedona’s signature red dirt. I wonder if he’s the guide who told me during a phone conversation that he’s a “contactee” — meaning he’s had encounters with extraterrestrial beings.
“Are you Michael?” I ask, a little sheepishly. “No, I’m waiting for him,” Whitney Robinson replies. “My wife and I are on the tour.”
That would be a UFO tour.
Robinson and his wife, Deb, along with me and two other Sedona visitors, have signed up to venture with a man named Michael to the top of Airport Mesa, don night vision goggles and get a glimpse of mysterious realms beyond Earth.
The Robinsons are from Huntsville, Alabama, and on the tail end of a nine-day vacation in Sedona, where they’ve been engaged in “cultural immersion,” according to Deb. Their vacation has been filled with tours to local energy spots known as vortices, yoga on the red rocks and jeep outings to ancient archaeological sites. But given Sedona’s world-renowned reputation for the paranormal, a UFO tour is a must-do item on their bucket list.
As for me, after hiking in Red Rock Country for three decades and frequently running into people claiming some kind of spiritual experience or extraterrestrial encounter, I’m seeking to answer questions of my own. Namely: What is it about Sedona that makes this landscape ground zero for all things woo-woo? An October 2024 New York Times story called Sedona the nation’s “New Age capital,” but that’s a moniker the city has held for decades. I’ve long wondered if there’s really something otherworldly going on — or if the area’s paranormal vibes are a product of marketing and social media hype.
Michael, the owner of Arizona UFO Tours, pulls into the parking lot as the sun is setting. He drives a Chevy Suburban emblazoned with a skinny green alien and topped with a flashing green light that rotates like the lights of a pursuing police car. Over his long gray hair, he’s wearing a bright green derby hat that matches the color of the alien but also has a festive St. Patrick’s Day vibe. (I’m referring to Michael by his first name in lieu of his “legal” last name, “O’Sedona,” which he says honors both his heritage and his beloved hometown.)
After some parking lot banter — during which we learn that Michael’s vehicle is called Spaceburban One, that he’s played in a band and that he “met aliens face to face in 2001” — Michael gives us instructions about the evening ahead. We then caravan up the switchbacks of Airport Road and past the crowded trailhead for the Airport Mesa vortex. Eventually, we stop at a remote spot atop the mesa that’s enveloped in darkness and adjacent to an old landing strip.
Michael pulls drum stools out of the Spaceburban, and we arrange them in a semicircle on a flat gravel area surrounded by junipers. The lights of Sedona twinkle hundreds of feet below our perch, and crickets serenade us as we settle onto the stools. Michael hands each of us “third generation” goggles he says will allow us to see “spaceship size” objects as far as 1,000 miles away.
We press the goggles to our faces and look toward the heavens, like a group of serious birders searching for a rare species. I’m skeptical: How is this different from studying the stars with the naked eye? But then, the universe suddenly opens up.
“I see something moving!” I exclaim. “Yes!” Deb responds, “I see it too.” A greenish orb, seemingly sailing among the stars, is traveling in an easterly direction. Its speed and path appear erratic.
“That’s not a satellite,” Michael says, matter-of-factly. “That’s a spaceship.”
Modern-day Sedona, with its UFO tours, guided vortex hikes, psychics and crystal shops, is nothing like the sleepy ranching community Lisa Schnebly Heidinger remembers from her childhood in the 1960s. “Cattle were driven down the main street,” she says. “It was an agricultural town of ‘scrabblers’ where people did whatever they could to make ends meet.”
Schnebly Heidinger is the great-granddaughter of Sedona Schnebly, for whom the city is named. Her family spent summers in the isolated haven along Oak Creek, visiting her grandfather Ellsworth, the son of Sedona and T.C. Schnebly. “Grandpa would go to the post office every day to visit and catch up on the news,” Schnebly Heidinger recalls. “He often returned with stories about how ‘another one of those love vans full of hippies came into town’ and they were vanquished from his fair city.” Ellsworth would laugh as he recounted that the owners of the local gas station had refused to serve the hippies, who were forced to continue on to nearby Cottonwood to buy their supplies.
But in the late 1970s and early ’80s, a psychic named Page Bryant spent a few years living in Sedona, and everything changed. Bryant, who died in 2017, coined the term “vortex” to describe places on the red rock landscape she said were emanating a powerful energy that had healing properties. These included easily accessible Coconino National Forest landmarks such as Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock and Boynton Canyon. Word of the vortices spread among the nation’s growing New Age movement, drawing many pilgrims to town. Then, in 1987, Sedona served as a gathering spot for the Harmonic Convergence, a New Age event celebrated at sites around the world. It attracted more than 5,000 seekers to Sedona and cemented the city’s reputation as a mecca for alternative spirituality.
Today, Sedona’s vortices and metaphysical businesses are one engine of a thriving tourism economy that has made the city, along with the surrounding national forest, among the most visited scenic attractions in the state. On its Visit Sedona website, the Sedona Chamber of Commerce describes vortices as “enhanced energy locations that facilitate prayer, meditation, mind/body healing and exploring your relationship with your soul and the divine.”
The city of 10,000 people hosts some 3 million visitors per year, and according to a recent Chamber of Commerce survey, at least a third of these tourists are seeking “spiritual and metaphysical activities.” Traffic on hiking trails leading to vortex sites has climbed steadily, especially in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Data compiled by the Coconino National Forest shows that trail visits to Cathedral Rock have more than doubled over the past decade, to more than 165,000 per year, and the number of hikers venturing into Boynton Canyon has nearly doubled in just five years, to some 133,000 annually.
Given the steady draw of vortex sites, public land managers find themselves in an awkward position. Visitors often ask whether the so-called energy spots are real. According to L.J. Varon-Burkhart of the national forest’s Red Rock Ranger District, the answer is no — at least from a scientific perspective.
“Vortex energies are not something the [U.S.] Forest Service can back scientifically,” Varon-Burkhart adds. “But we are not going to dismiss people’s spiritual beliefs or say that your hike won’t bring you peace and happiness, because it certainly will. Meditating on top of a rock may not involve traditional ideas around outdoor recreation, but it is no more or less valid a use than hiking or mountain biking.”
Colorado Plateau geologist and author Wayne Ranney echoes the Forest Service’s stance on vortices. “I don’t want to challenge anyone’s spiritual or religious beliefs,” he says, “but I have noticed that places identified as vortices are no different, geologically, than adjacent areas.” He adds that if there were sites emanating the Earth’s energy, they logically would be near geological features such as faults and volcanic vents. And unlike Sedona’s erosion-sculpted landscape, the San Francisco Volcanic Field, near Flagstaff, has 600 such vents where the Earth opened up long ago and magma flowed onto the surface.
These scientific realities haven’t discouraged seekers from visiting Sedona, where demand for paranormal experiences is stronger than ever. Due to the area’s unique spiritual reputation, the Red Rock district administers a permit for “metaphysical” uses of the forest. The system regulates which guides can offer vortex and other spiritual tours, as well as what those guides are allowed to do. The permit system began in 2012 as a response to the New Age free-for-all of the 1990s and early 2000s, when self-proclaimed “shamans” were guiding people to vortex sites and conducting rituals that damaged the landscape. They would leave behind rock medicine wheels, feathers, candles and other talismans; all of that is banned today, as is pretending to be a shaman, burning sage or amplifying New Age music.
And what about looking for UFOs? There have long been stories of alien spaceships parked beneath Secret Mountain and extraterrestrials visiting vortex sites. Varon-Burkhart, who manages the district’s special use permits, says while the Forest Service has given the green light to astronomy guides, the agency will not allow anything related to claims involving life beyond Earth.
This doesn’t hinder UFO tours in Sedona, though. They just happen on private land.
After about five minutes of peering through the sophisticated night vision goggles, I’m stunned by how many objects are cruising around in outer space. The goggles allow our group to view many more shooting stars than we might see with the naked eye, but there also are a multitude of orbs seemingly not of stellar origin.
I’m used to looking up at a dark night sky on camping trips and finding peace in the twinkling Milky Way and the warm glow of planets. However, what we’re witnessing atop Airport Mesa feels more like rush hour traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. Dozens, if not hundreds, of glowing orbs are on the move.
Michael continues to point out which objects are likely satellites and which are “spaceships” affiliated with life beyond Earth. He calls them UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena, the U.S. government’s modern replacement term for UFOs. “There is a lot we don’t know about them,” he says, “such as who is flying them or where they came from.”
Unlike other UFO tours in Sedona that claim extra-terrestrials are attracted to Red Rock Country, Michael says there’s nothing special about Airport Mesa — the objects we’re seeing are so high up that they could be spotted from anywhere in the Southwest. Sedona, in other words, is not a unique magnet for UFOs; it’s just that more people looking for them are drawn to the city. “People come on my tour to get the truth,” Michael adds, “no matter what that reveals.”
Later, I research possible reasons behind the galactic traffic. According to a satellite tracking website, there are some 10,000 active satellites — 10 times as many as a decade ago — cruising around the planet. Many are communications satellites launched from the United States. However, there’s also plenty of space junk — things such as decommissioned satellites and rocket boosters — that people on Earth have lost track of. Thus, even though we can’t see them with the naked eye, hundreds of objects are passing above our heads every minute of the day.
Watching the cosmic congestion leaves me a bit rattled, so I check in later with the Robinsons to get their take on what we saw from our Sedona perch. Did they think some of the cruising orbs could be UFOs? “It was amazing,” says Whitney, a retired thermal engineer. “You can call them whatever you want,” he adds, referring to the objects Michael said were spaceships, “but from the engineering side of the house, they were doing things that went beyond what is possible with current satellite technology.”
For Deb and Whitney, who are frequent travelers, the deep dive into Sedona’s paranormal dimensions provided a unique vacation experience that was both freeing and healing. “When you get onto that landscape, you are allowed to think outside the box without being called crazy,” Whitney says. “I didn’t feel so encumbered there.”
“No other place is like that,” Deb adds. “I am still feeling the positive effects.”
Spinning pseudoscientific tales of vortex energy or extraterrestrial activity may seem harmless. And there are countless people who, like the Robinsons, have benefited from metaphysical explorations in Sedona as they searched for their own truths. But there’s a downside to the vortex hype — one that rarely comes up in tourism marketing.
Appropriation of American Indian spirituality has historically gone hand in hand with the New Age movement, and Sedona is no exception. For example, The History of New Age Sedona, a 1996 book by Toraya Ayres, describes Red Rock Country as an “interdimensional portal” and goes on to state, “Star people were said to have touched down in ancient times. … Native Americans kept their contact with other galactic people secret for centuries, but now some of them have begun to share their knowledge.”
Meanwhile, a 1998 vortex guidebook by Richard Dannelley describes Bell Rock as “one of the primary focal points of the energy grid of electromagnetic Earth Energy, which connects many Power Spots around the planet together. This energy grid, which Native Americans sometimes call ‘the Web,’ is an electromagnetic field in our biosphere that affects all life forms on the planet.”
Linking American Indian culture to New Age mythologies not only is offensive to the Yavapais and Apaches, the Indigenous peoples of the Sedona area, but also obscures the true and painful history of displacement from those peoples’ homeland. The two tribes were forcibly removed from the Verde Valley in the 1870s and marched to Eastern Arizona’s San Carlos Reservation to live in concentration-camp-like conditions. When they were allowed to return to the region in the early 20th century, they were corralled onto a small reservation south of Sedona, merged by the federal government into one tribe — the Yavapai-Apache Nation — and formally dispossessed of most of their homeland.
According to Reba Franco, a Yavapai elder and the Yavapai culture specialist for the tribe, any narrative about an American Indian connection to Sedona’s vortex sites or UFOs is “made up.” She says the tribe keeps its distance from Sedona’s New Age scene and businesses attempting to capitalize on appropriated Indigenous rituals.
However, Boynton Canyon, one purported vortex site, holds great significance for the Yavapais. Their origin story tells of a girl who emerged from Montezuma Well and, during a great flood, floated on a log to land in the canyon. “We call Boynton Canyon our holy place, our first home,” Franco says. Today, tribal members have to navigate around a large resort and hordes of seekers to get to their sacred site.
For Maurice Crandall, a Yavapai-Apache Nation member and associate professor at Arizona State University, claims about a special energy emanating from the Sedona landscape are “co-opting” the spiritual relationship that the Yavapais and Apaches have long had with their homeland. “From a Yavapai-Apache perspective, the Sedona area is sacred because that is where our life began and all our stories took place,” he says. “I understand how [non-Natives] are smitten with the landscape and its beauty. But they also need to understand that the spiritual power they may feel is due to the land’s historical connection to Indigenous people.”
Derek von Briesen
Crandall encourages Sedona seekers to visit the Yavapai-Apache Nation’s Cultural Resource Center to learn about the true Indigenous history in Red Rock Country. He also cautions against hooking up with a guide claiming dubious connections to American Indian ancestry or charging for performing Indigenous rituals, which he notes is “taboo” for most tribes. “Not only is it disrespectful,” he says, “but it profanes the spiritual power of the land.”
The day after the UFO tour with Michael — who, for the record, does not draw any connections between American Indians and extraterrestrials — I meet up with a different kind of guide. I’ve signed on for a trek aimed simply at thinking about thinking — and talking about it. Sedona Philosophy is an outfitter that eschews the standard vortex hike and instead encourages its clients to explore what they’re truly seeking at a so-called energy spot.
“Our clients usually come to Sedona because they are searching for some kind of experience that is out of the ordinary,” Sedona Philosophy guide and co-founder Matt Goodwin says. “They may have suffered a loss or find themselves in an existential crisis. They may be initially drawn to images of the beautiful scenery, but then they become interested in the metaphysical or spiritual aspects of the place.”
Goodwin and I are standing on a hill at Red Rock State Park that overlooks Oak Creek, which is lined with cottonwood trees on the verge of turning gold. The fiery orange buttes of Cathedral Rock rise to the east, commanding the horizon like twin castles.
Goodwin and his partner, Andrea Christelle, who both hold Ph.D.s in philosophy, started their guide service in 2015. They wanted to offer an alternative for Sedona visitors seeking a connection to the landscape that goes beyond a quick, Instagram-ready photo and checking an item off the bucket list. They do this by introducing various “thought traditions” while on a hike; these include teachings of Greek philosophers, Buddhism, Taoism and conservationists such as Aldo Leopold.
Not only are many Sedona Philosophy clients seeking a new way to think about their life circumstances, but it’s also often their first time in a landscape as striking and seemingly otherworldly as Red Rock Country. “When we look out on the horizon here, it evokes a sense of wonder and takes us out of ourselves, perhaps in a way that has never happened before,” Goodwin says. He believes people are prone to attributing such an uplifting experience to a supernatural cause, such as a vortex. “My view is that you are simply experiencing nature,” he adds. “It’s not metaphysical. It’s just that our experience in nature can sometimes be so powerful that we want to make it into something more.”
This explanation resonates with me. Sedona’s sublime yet inviting terrain offers transcendence from a world full of pavement and flickering screens. And transcendence can nurture the soul. The land has a beauty and power not tied to anything beyond the natural forces that created it and the Indigenous people who stewarded it.
Eventually, Goodwin and I make our way down to the creek — “walking and talking” in the tradition of ancient philosophers, as he notes. As we pause in the shade of an old cottonwood, Goodwin tells me his philosophical specialty is phenomenology, the study of direct experience.
“So, do you try to define what is real, versus not real?” I ask. My mind is still spinning from the UFO tour and the idea of life existing elsewhere in the universe — an idea that seems illogical, but also possible. I’m caught in a philosophical conundrum.
“Anything we experience could count as being real,” Goodwin says. While scientists may beg to differ, phenomenologists are reluctant to declare what is real, because a person’s experience is subjective.
After Goodwin and I return to the trailhead parking lot, I feel like both my legs and my brain have gotten a workout. The spectacular landscape enveloping us, along with my philosophical guide, has inspired me to contemplate questions that are essentially unanswerable. Which I find quite enjoyable. As Albert Einstein once wrote, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious.” And there’s no better place to engage in mystery than among the radiant red rocks of Sedona.