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Roswell, NM → Corona, NM → Ruidoso Downs, NM 174 mi (280.1 km) |
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As I rolled north from Carlsbad Caverns National Park, a strange wind started to blow! It followed me all the way up through Carlsbad, Artesia, and into Roswell, the county seat of Chaves County and one of the most deeply rooted cities in American folklore! I had no sooner gotten out of the car to see the road sign when a strange, yet familiar, humming grew louder in the sky overhead. With a sudden whoosh, the Alien from Po-Pohl appeared and beckoned me to follow it into town!
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Roswell is a city synonymous with visitation from other worlds! Downtown Roswell brims with alien-themed gift shops, restaurants, and artwork, featuring the big-eyed, green-skinned E.T.s that have probed their way into America’s zeitgeist. It all started with a single headline in the Roswell Daily Record on July 8, 1947 that read “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region!”
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And if ever there were a place to learn how Roswell crash-landed onto the map, it would be at the International UFO Museum. Founded in 1991, this is the hub of UFO research with an extensive library to accompany its displays. Inside, its walls are adorned with news articles, interviews, and replicas of “actual items from the crash site!”
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This might come as a surprise, but Roswell wasn’t really considered a big deal for about thirty years after the incident. Mac Brazel, who owned the farm where the object crashed, waited a few days to go into town and report what he had found. Roger Ramey of the Eighth Air Force announced that the crash was caused by a weather balloon, the recovered bodies merely dummies designed to test survival techniques for pilots, and the public was generally okay with that. Two years after World War II, trust in the government and the military was pretty high, all in all.
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Fast forward, past the fight for Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and the Pentagon Papers, to 1980 when two fellows named Charles Berlitz and William Moore published The Roswell Incident and proclaimed loudly that the Roswell incident had been part of a coverup. Their book featured almost a hundred new interviews of folks who had witnessed the event. The interviews described horrible smells from the bodies, witness intimidation by the military, even a complete swap of weather balloon materials for saucer parts before the press could arrive!
The single account of a weather balloon, even the more exciting, top-secret, high-altitude surveillance program called Project Mogul, could not hold up against the sea of additional books, movies, TV shows, comics, clubs, and conventions that warped into the American consciousness like little green men! Here in the museum, there were diagrams and articles detailing flying objects both unidentified and identified, with sighting reports from around the world. There was a life-sized flying saucer that blew smoke intermittently over an alien crew. It seemed a whole lot more interesting than a weather balloon to me!
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After perusing the neat stuff in the gift shop, we returned outside once more. The Alien from Po-Pohl told me there was something more about the incident that I didn’t know. The crash didn’t actually happen here in Roswell. It happened about fifty miles to the northwest, closer to Corona than Roswell, though Roswell was the larger city. The Alien asked me if I wanted to see the crash site, and I said sure!
Oh wait! First, I wanted to see the Chaves County courthouse, which is on the National Register. It was done in the Beaux-Arts style, sparing no expense, because the next year, the new state of New Mexico would assume all county debt at the state level! Pretty clever!
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Okay, I told the Alien at last. Let’s go see the crash site. And with a wave of its hand, away we went!
We zapped back into existence in a strange place with pink skies and howling gales! Desolate and far from all signs of civilization, I thought at first that we’d arrived on a different planet, but no, it was just New Mexico. This is the Land of Enchantment after all! A tall monument of stacked stones rose alongside a stone marker placed by the Sci Fi Channel in 2003. Somewhere before us, in the sea of wind-whipped grasses, the original debris field slumbered the sleep of history.
I confessed to the Alien that I wasn’t so sure about this whole Roswell incident. There were a lot of questions that I felt hadn’t been answered by either side. The Alien shrugged, beeped twice, and scattered glittering powder into the air, which spread in the roaring wind all across the debris field. Taking my hand, it warped me back to Roswell and left me where I’d started. The mysterious wind settled.
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I finished my drive to Ruidoso Downs in the dark, staring up at the pitch blackness overhead and wondering about the mysteries beyond what I was able to see. How many would come to Earth from above, and how many were already brewing right here on terra firma? And where the heck was Po-Pohl anyway? There are a lot of questions I should ask that Alien the next time it appears. If only I could understand what the beep it’s saying.
To infinity and beyond!
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Total Ground Covered: 419.1 mi (674.6 km) |
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