In my mind, Roswell would be this small little town out in the middle of nothing with maybe six or seven little buildings. You have got to be kidding me! A long time ago someone made up a story about a UFO landing here and now, out in the middle of nothing, is this huge town with a bazillion hotels, a gazillion fast food restaurants and even two skyscrapers. But from what I could tell on our walk, the aliens must have stolen the river. Here is walk they call a "nice paved trail along the river."
It just looked like a six inch wide sewer to us, with quite a lot of garbage along the way. We walked for about two hours. I tried really hard to find something that was worthy of a picture. Finally, I found one tiny little patch of pretty grass.
Nearby was a fire hydrant. I guess Boogie has never seen one before as he was very scared. He did that little thing where he leans forward slowly and then jumps back. But mostly he growled and barked. He wasn't going to turn his back on it to walk away so he walked backward while continuing to growl. What a silly boy.
The one, and only, thing we saw on the walk that was interesting was a very small little viewing area. According the the sign, during WWII there was a prison camp built near Roswell where 4,800 German prisoners were kept. A 50-man detail worked on a flood-control project by layering rocks on the Spring River (you're kidding me - they even named this trickle of water a river!) banks. At one point on the north river bank they used different sized rocks to make an iron cross on the bank. Some Roswell citizens were incensed by this and poured five yards of concrete over the POW's handiwork. The concrete washed away over the years, and the iron cross is clearly visible again as you can see in my picture. And that was that - you've seen ALL the highlights of our two hour walk.
Finally I (Mike) got to visit one of the holy sites of UFOlogy, Roswell, New Mexico and tour the Museum of UFO Research.
To my pleasant surprise, the museum was actually pretty thorough in relating the 1947 Roswell incident, and although credulous about the flying saucer stories it tried to be objective. If somehow you are not familiar with the Roswell incident, the basic story is that in July 1947 something unfamiliar crashed on a sheep ranch just north of Roswell. The rancher brought some of the debris into town a few days later and showed it to the local paper and the nearby Air Force base. Since this was in the middle of the one of the first UFO crazes, just a few weeks after the Arnold UFO sighting in Washington State that created the concept of the flying saucer, the press immediately announced that a flying disc had crashed and been found.
The supposed alien spacecraft debris was nothing more than aluminum foil, neoprene rubber and balsa wood from a top secret balloon project the Air Force was experimenting with for detecting Russian nuclear tests. Although the general of the base quickly retracted the flying saucer claim, he could not tell what it really was and tried to call it a weather balloon. Thus began a seemingly endless tale of mysterious government cover-ups, captured alien spaceships, and dead little aliens in the possession of the Air Force.
This is from a scene from a TV movie about Roswell showing an alien autopsy.
The museum had copies of letter from many supposed witnesses to secret shipments of extraterrestrial materials and bodies and other weird events, most of the evidence for the cover-up seemed to consist of the memories from long after the event or what grandchildren remember from 1947. They all just talked about rumors and unusually mysterious shipments and boxes, but nobody claimed to have actually seen anything but the tinfoil, rubber and wood. There was little mention of the fact that the local Air Force base was heavily involved with a lot of top secret activity in the late 1940’s because of its proximity to the Los Alamos atomic labs and the White Sands Missile base where captured German rockets and scientists were being used to create the US space program. So unusual flights and shipments and strange top secret events were probably going on all the time. Yet the story never seems to die out. As recently as 1996 there were excavations at the site looking for evidence of alien artifacts, but they don’t seem to have found anything.
About half of the museum was devoted to the Roswell crash, and the rest to a general history of the UFO story and the types of evidence and events that have taken place. They even had the panel from ancient Mexico that some people think portrays an alien astronaut and space craft visiting earth thousands of years ago. Not skeptical enough for my taste, but at least not totally loony about it.
Debbie & Mike
10/29/07
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