Tag Archives: Roswell

Nope

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No, no it didn’t.

⋞Something Happened Here: Roswell prepares for Pentagon’s UFO report⋟

On the eve of the release of the Pentagon’s highly anticipated report on unidentified aerial phenomena, life here in one of the world’s UFO hotspots was exceedingly normal.

Downtown’s alien souvenir shops and the International UFO Museum welcomed a steady stream of visitors escaping their pandemic malaise on Thursday as coronavirus restrictions continued to loosen in New Mexico.

The US government will release a declassified report on Friday detailing its analysis of various unidentified flying phenomena. City leaders hope that outsiders’ enthusiasm about the report will pique their interest in visiting.

Pretty much lays it all out there. There are some fascinated folks, a fantacist or two, and some locals who never think a thing about it, except it separates the first two from their money.

Born and raised there in the early 60s, I never heard of it in detail until the 90s. My grandparents (with my mother and siblings in tow) moved to Roswell in June 1947, a few weeks before an Air Force/NYU screw-up experiment crashed 70 miles north. My grandfather may have mentioned it in passing in the 70s or so and people remembered it, but not as anything real. When the 50th came around, so did the tourists and their cash, and <ka-ching> Roswell, where Billy the Kid nosed around, had something going for it besides the fireworks factory (which blew up), the mozzarella cheese factory (no, really), the bus-manufacturing center (belly-up), and the airliner graveyard going for it. Ever since, it’s aliens everywhere.

The Plains Theater is where I saw my first movie in a theater (Blackbeard’s Ghost) with its unfortunate press-ganging of Peter Ustinov and Elsa Lanchester—poor souls, it was like putting Leonardo da Vinci and Georgia O’Keefe into a Quentin Tarantino movie—into typical-for-the-period Disney fare with its ubiquitous Dean Jones, a movie that scared the bejeezus out of me and I started crying and my sister had to take me to the lobby—Disney movies still scare the bejeezus out of me. Ugh.). Anyway. The Plains is now the … ahem … “International UFO Research and Science Museum” or something like that, and there are lots of mannequins and green paint and some books, I’m given to understand, where I stood and cried at being forced to see Dean Jones try to keep up while Elsa and Peter wiped the floor with him.

Ugh.

Roswell is a farm town. The fields around the city on the Pecos, where my grandfather farmed from 1947 to 1971, grow alfalfa and dairy cows. My field trip in first grade at Parkview Elementary School was to a dairy. There’s some oil bidness that fluctuates and a lotta windmills.

And that’s it. No cosmic crash landings or autopsies, no gummint conspiracy, just miles of sagebrush and yucca plants and cows and antelope and pecans and a stupid attempt to fool the Soviets when both they and we were up to very much Double Plus-Ungood.

It’s my hometown. I’m proud of being a New Mexican. Being a Roswellite is more of a conversation piece, but heck I’m proud of that, too. Prouder of the mountains to the west and the state and the skies and wind and storms and sunsets. But if you want aliens? Drive up to Santa Fe and gawk at the Californians or to Ruidoso and gawk at the Texans.

[Update 2-Oct-24: This Wired article contains the final, definitive word on the “Roswell Incident,” which is inaccurately named, since the site is closer to the ghost town of Arabella 60 miles from Roswell along the 80-mile-long stretch of NM 255 (aka the old Pine Lodge Road). We snooped on the Russians, didn’t want them to know we were snooping; and we dropped crash test dummies to increase safety for high-altitude ejections of air force pilots. Period.]

The Road

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Navajo Motel, Roswell, NM
Navajo Motel, Roswell, NM

I dream of a different future which might just be possible only if I win a lottery. Or a semi-truck runs over us and a TV lawyer collects a big ol’ settlement.

A house. Built from scratch. In my home state. A meditation/de-stressing center where anyone can go to have some simple peace and quiet and be alone if they want to be or with others if they need community or a therapist or advisor if they need help.

I dream of book ends to my life; the first part of it was New Mexico, so let the last part be the same.

I first hit the road that is US70 when I was a day or two old. A block east to 70/North Main, a right on 70/Second, a left on Wyoming, a right on Juniper and there I was.

I hit the road long-haul when my uncle was killed in Oklahoma when I was six months old. We were due to go anyway for an extended family vacation; it was an extended family funeral with long-term repercussions for everyone. US70 was my first road, and it was often a route of sorrow. Visiting grandparents who were fading away. Watching my grandfather take his last breath after eight hours on US70. Visiting my grandmother after yet more hours on US70 as she, deep in Alzheimer’s, told me a story that made perfect sense to her, about her mother, that was mostly gibberish to me. Our last moments together.

Whether it was Roswell-Duncan or Duncan-Roswell, US70 was the thread that bound the two halves of our lives: Mom’s immediate family in Roswell, her extended and Dad’s family in Duncan. A road ran between them. I knew every spot on the road. An area just east of the Pecos River that I loved and thought of as “my” canyon. The Dairy Queen in Floydada is the halfway point of any trip. Gas stations. Shabby courthouses and dusty, shuttered downtowns every thirty miles in west Texas, ticking off the miles on the road. Vernon, Crowell, Paducah, Matador, Floydada, Plainview, Muleshoe, Farwell. We knew which restrooms were decent.

Dad would light a cigarette every 20 minutes. I’d try to roll down the window, he’d roll it up to a crack, and we’d breathe in the smoke and sigh relief when he put it out. Irritation would again mount as the next one was lit. He would get speeding tickets rather often around Matador, Texas. My sisters got the window seats and I was often squashed in the middle. I would kneel on the floorboard, lay my head on the seat, and sleep. Sometimes, there wasn’t as much cigarette smoke that way. It was like I was kneeling at an altar, the altar of US70, speeding along at 70 mph. With the speed limit often being 55, this would result in attention from the Texas Highway Patrol.

US70 is always two lanes through Texas. It took decades for the 90-mile stretch between Portales and Roswell to be expanded to four lanes. Now it’s smooth and wide and there’s no dangerous passing and the speed limit is 70 and people go 80 because there’s nothing out there. Derelict towns like Elida and Kenna, the Elkins bar, the abandoned schoolhouse from the 1920s, my canyon, the bridge over the Pecos which meant we were 10 miles from Roswell, either our home between 1957 or our destination from 1971.

When we moved from Roswell to Clovis along that road, my sister and I sang “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” over and over in the cab of the U-Haul while Dad was driving. He probably went a little insane and maybe smoked a little more. Another U-Haul along the road in 1974 took us to my 19 years, 10 months, 28 days, and 9 hours of exile in Oklahoma, a suffocating and hard experience for my teens and twenties that I still have difficulty with, for many, many reasons.

Now I use US70 often … going to work, shopping at Target, getting the car washed, going to Publix or Sonic or out to Mt. Juliet, or going into downtown … it’s all along US70. It’s not as mean a road or experience as taking that road to Oklahoma. It’s a kinder/gentler US70 in Tennessee, more benign. US70 West from Oklahoma to Roswell and Ruidoso was always a joy, a mounting excitement at going home. US70 East was always a hated road. It took me down from the Sacramento and Capitan mountains and ushered me back to ugly, flat west Texas and then to hated Oklahoma. US70 East here is just a trip to Kohl’s, US70 West takes us back home. A benign road. A central thread in life.

For my part, they could tear up eastbound 70 and make it one-way westbound only. It would always take me home and I’d never have to leave.