Howe received her 1965 B.A. cum laude in English Literature from the University of Colorado. In 1966, Howe was awarded the Stanley Baubaire Scholarship for her master's degree work at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. She received her master's degree in communication from Stanford University in 1968, where she produced a documentary film for the Stanford Medical Center and her Master's Thesis, "A Picture Calculus," at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

Howe's early work focused on environmental issues. From 1978 to 1983, Howe was Director of Special Projects at KMGH-TV, Channel 7, Denver, Colorado. Her documentaries included Poison in the Wind and A Sun Kissed Poison which compared smog pollution in Los Angeles and Denver, Fire In The Water about hydrogen as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels, and A Radioactive Water about uranium contamination of public drinking water in a Denver suburb.

Howe was on staff at WCVB-TV when the station won an Institutional Peabody Award for institutional excellence in 1975. For her early work focusing on environmental issues, she received Colorado's Florence Sabin Award for “outstanding contribution to public health" in 1982.

In 1980, Howe produced A Strange Harvest, a documentary that suggested unusual wounds found on cattle are the work of extraterrestrial beings who harvest body parts required for their survival or research, and that the U.S. government is complicit. The documentary received a Regional Emmy award for Audio Achievement in 1981.

Since then, Howe has produced numerous UFO related programming, including a two-hour special Earth Mysteries: Alien Life Forms in association with WATL-Fox, Atlanta, was Supervising Producer and Original Concept Creator for UFO Report: Sightings financed by Paramount Studios and the Fox network in Los Angeles that was first broadcast in October 1991 and became the Sightings series on Fox. Howe's An Alien Harvest received a New Mexico-Arizona Southwest Book Award in 2015.

One Idaho state director of Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) called Howe "the most preeminent UFO investigator in the world", and she's been named as one of "the gurus of American ufology".

Howe was a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM for 28 years, dating back to 2003 with George Noory, and 1991 with Art Bell. Howe has been interviewed on Larry King Live specials, CNN; The O'Reilly Factor, Fox; Sightings and Strange Universe, Fox; NBC's The Other Side; Britain's Union Pictures, ITN and BBC; The Discovery Channel special Evidence On Earth; the NBC network special, Mysterious Origins of Man, and the History Channel series Ancient Aliens.