Rachel, Nevada —

The first time Fontella “Faun” Day believes she saw life from another planet, it came from above.

It was a cloudy afternoon in Rachel, Nevada, and the phones and computers at the Alien Cowpoke gas station and mini mart where she works had been glitching for hours.

When Day finished her shift, she stepped outside for the short drive back to her home in the middle of the Mojave Desert. That’s when she saw it: Up in the sky, a peculiar cloud formation that looked remarkably like a flying saucer.

Her heart was pounding. She blinked to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. Even after she rubbed her eyes, the shape was still there, she says, hovering right above her. Something inside of her told her to grab her cell phone and snap some pictures. Today those images — and the eerie, vivid memory of that moment — are all she has from what she considers an otherworldly encounter.

“It was just a weird, weird day,” she said. “(People) say the reason (alien spaceships are in) that shape is because of the frequency of the ship. That’s how they hide behind the clouds, I guess.”

Day’s story is one of hundreds found along the Extraterrestrial Highway, a 140-mile ribbon of road in south central Nevada, just outside Las Vegas.

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The roadway, which runs through one of the darkest and most desolate stretches of the continental United States, is famous for alien encounters: Since the 1950s, there have been more reports of UFO sightings here than anywhere in the country.

Skeptics say these “UFOs” are probably just super stealth aircraft from the nearby Nellis Air Force Base.

Ufologists, those people who believe in aliens, have a different explanation for why this stretch of the Great Basin Desert seems to be