Roswell, NM

I'm playing catch-up and discovered this is a post that never happened. Here's a bit about our adventures in New Mexico...

After leaving Carlsbad, NM back in April we made a day trip to Roswell, NM to see about locating some aliens. I expected the city to be more the size of a town, something in the middle of nowhere but I was surprised. It was larger than expected though a bit run down, but was still more kept up than the deserted, burned out “villages” I had seen in between the metropolises around the state. You would not believe the number of ghost town and deserted farms along the sides of the road. It really looked like a very impoverished part of the country; desert, dusty and desolate.


We headed straight for the UFO museum because that's what people do in Roswell, right? I envisioned this to have large alien replicas and the actual pieces of the “ship” that people say they found in the '60s, but it was more like letters and newspapers pinned to the wall. There was a lot of reading. I hadn't remembered that the pieces of the unidentified craft were collected and taken to area 51 (well really an army hanger) where they later disappeared. Thus the conspiracy theory was born. What I do know is Roswell is not far from White Sands missile flats where they test missiles, it is not a heavily populated area, and there is an army base nearby. So, what was it that people saw in the sky? It could have been a downed missile or military testing item, or it could have been a convenient place for aliens to crash land without being detected. Either way, we'll never really know since the pieces went missing. The part that was really confusing was the eye witness account by a nurse who saw three small humanoid bodies with heads that did not look human and for which child-sized caskets were purchased. Whatever happened, no one was talking until right before their deaths and that eye witness was never located to make any comments. The part that fueled the fire was the fact that the government kept changing their stories about what seemingly happened. I halfway expected this legend to simply be a tourist trap without any basis at all, but the story is very real and continues to evolve even to this day. There was a news report just the next day relating to the Roswell siting. I didn't see any alien bodies except for a few used in more recent movie/TV shows. If you don't believe in what happened you should make the trip to visit this museum to read the various sides of the story. They do a great job presenting it for the public to draw their own conclusions though it is not overly interesting for the littlest travelers.

This is the only picture I have from our Roswell visit since there was not much to see. I sent this postcard to my friends kids and one of them asked why the aliens weren't wearing any pants. Good question! Kids say the funniest things.