The Devil’s Tower is a monolithic volcanic feature in the Black Hills of northern Wyoming, USA.
The granite structure rises 386 meters above the surrounding landscape, with a top elevation of 1,558 meters above sea level.
President Theodore Roosevelt named the mysterious natural marvel the first declared national monument in the United States on September 24, 1906.
The spectacular terrain around the Devil’s Tower is mainly composed of sedimentary rocks, and William Rogers and Willard Ripley performed the first known ascent to the Devil’s Tower in 1893.
The Pleiades and the Devil’s Tower
According to the stories of the Kiowa, Sioux, and Lakota Native American tribes, in the distant past, several young girls went out to play. They were noticed by gigantic bears who began following them.
The girls went to the top of a rock to avoid the bears, knelt, and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them.
When the Great Spirit heard their prayers, he caused the boulder to expand toward the sky, preventing the bears from reaching the girls.
The bears left deep claw marks on the sides of the rock in their attempt to climb it, which had become too steep, and when the girls reached the sky, they created the Pleiades constellation.
According to certain ancient astronaut idea scholars, many of these stories came from extraterrestrial-related occurrences, and UFO encounters in the past.
There are, however, other myths and traditions surrounding the strange rock structure.
According to Sioux legend, two lads fled their community as another giant bear with claws began after them. When the bear came close to grabbing the lads, they prayed to Wakan Tanka, “the holy” or “the divine,” the Great Spirit, to save them.
They scaled a massive rock while the bear urgently attempted to scale it and capture the two lads. However, the bear could not climb and left giant footprints on the rock. The bear, nicknamed “Bush,” ultimately gave up and died in what is now known as Bear Butte.
Wanblee, an eagle, saved the lads and assisted them in escaping from the enormous rock, bringing them to their town.
Some hypotheses believe that the entities that seem to defend the residents of the location, such as the Wanblee eagle, are spacecraft and alien beings mistaken by the ancient inhabitants of the period as gods and giant birds.
The film Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Devil’s Tower was featured as a backdrop in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which was advised by astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a member of the Blue Book Project, a study of UFOs conducted by the United States Air Force between 1952 and 1969.
Like in many other adjacent locations, travelers and locals noticed strange lights directly above the mysterious rock structure in the sky.
Witnesses report that these lights end up at the summit of the gigantic rock. Since it has a strong association with alien entities and legends of beings from the sky, Steven Spielberg picked the Devil’s Tower for his renowned film.
