robotnik2004 | All’s Well That Roswell (Reply)

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

New Mexico: It’s The Newer Mexico

Do you think they ever get tired of jokes like that in New Mexico?

<--The picture they don't want you to see: me witnessing an alien autopsy, or Jonathan Frakes hosting a crappy special on Fox? You be the judge…

(Don’t Go Back to) Roswell

You may not consider it anything to brag about, but I was a UFO geek long before a certain alphabetically named television program brought the wonderful wide world of ETs, MIBs, and EBEs into America’s living rooms. And–with the possible exception of Nevada’s Area 51, which is in the middle of a missile testing range and not real hospitable to roadtrippers–Roswell, New Mexico is the Mecca of UFO geekdom.

Here’s the facts, sort of. In July 1947, something crashed in the desert northwest of Roswell. A U.S. Army press release said that the army had recovered pieces of some form of “flying saucer.” The next day a second press release declared that the object was in fact a weather balloon, and that’s been the official story ever since.

Now, maybe “flying saucer” was just a poor choice of words by some dumb Army Press Department hack who has been peeling potatoes for his screw-up ever since. Or, just maybe, the Roswell Crash is one lone crack in the facade of a fifty-year coverup engineered by a massive and ruthless conspiracy stretching to the highest level of government, if not the very stars!

Now, which explanation do you think brings more tourists to Roswell?

Welcome Visitors! Flabjabbian Blaffle Accepted at Par!

The International UFO Museum and Research Center, or NAMBLA, is an impressive name for a little storefront with a cheesy plastic flying saucer thing hung above the door. [2006 Edit: Or it was just a little storefront in 1996. I actually think we arrived just before Roswell and the UFO thing had its fifteen minutes of pop culture fame, thanks to The X-Files and the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash.] It’s crammed with pictures and clippings of all the golden oldies on the UFO-seeker jukebox: the foo fighters of World War II, Mothman and the Bermuda Triangle, the Betty and Barney Hill abductions, and of course, the Roswell crash and Area 51.

What I really enjoyed there was the pretense that the Museum is not just a tourist trap but a “research center,” complete with reading rooms and archives of UFO evidence and reports. What fearless crusader for the Truth could be without an alien head suncatcher / Xmas ornament ($4.95), a flying saucer guitar strap ($6.95), or a “picture of possible debris metal” (wow! just $5!)?

<--The Truth Is In Here: Pete and Derek in Roswell’s nattily-furnished “UFO Research Center.”

I got a great book in the “archives” called Space Aliens From the Pentagon which reveals that: (read this next sentence with ever increasing speed and volume) the Roswell aliens were in fact rhesus MONKEYS sewed into space suits in an attempt by the Freemason-led CIA to cover up the SECRET GOVERNMENT’s very REAL flying saucers, built and piloted NOT by aliens or monkeys but by psychotic cattle-mutilating HUMANS, a program made possible by secret ANTI-GRAVITY TECHNOLOGY invented by Nikola Tesla in the 1920s but STOLEN BY THE NAZIS who are of course PAWNS of the ILLUMINATI and who used flying anti-gravity submarines to win YES I SAID THE NAZIS WON the Second World War and who in fact CONTINUE TO RULE the U.S. and indeed the world by remote MIND CONTROL from their TOP SECRET UNDERGROUND BASE IN ANTARCTICA! Whoo!

Little Green Butt-Probers vs. Scab Dukes

All in all, I’d say them little green butt-probers made a good choice crash landing in Roswell. After touring the gift shop–sorry, “research center”–we did some laundry, strolled the main drag, and spent the day just hanging out with Roswell’s friendly terrestrial inhabitants. One chatty old guy gave us a lecture on alien physiology: “Now, yer basic Gray alien, he’s got no visible genitalia, you unnerstand, and no digestive or ex-cretive system as fer as we can ascertain. But what they do got is a heart, or pumpin’ mechanism of some kind, and an ammonia-based life-givin’ fluid.”

Derek got talking to a nice retired couple that had lived in Roswell for over thirty years and were firm believers in the alien crash. They said they were friends with a local undertaker who was awakened by Men in Black that fateful night in 1947 and ordered to produce four coffins for some mysterious burial… four little coffins… like little alien-sized coffins, get it? But is the CIA IllumiNazi UN UFO Majestic-12 conspiracy really incapable of hammering together its own coffins? And why do aliens need to be buried in coffins anyway? I sense treachery.

We also played several games of Galaga (which I admit wasn’t really in keeping with Roswell’s message of interplanetary brotherhood), had some of the best damn “crackers”* I’ve ever experienced, and caught a rare “scab Duke” episode of The Dukes of Hazzard on the laundromat TV.** If there’s more to life than this, I haven’t seen any ads for it.

*crackers: a slip of my tongue that became the trip’s demented term for nachos–as in, “hey, can we get another plate o’ them fancy crackers?”

**scab Dukes: Loyal Hazzardians must remember the one half season when Tom “Luke” Wopat and John “Bo” Schneider deluded themselves into thinking they had more marketable talents than just sliding in and out the windows of the General Lee. Without missing a beat, the incestuous Duke clan just coughed up another pair of tight-panted “cousins.” Then Wopat and Schneider returned, and now catching a rare “scab Duke” episode is like finding a Revenge of the Jedi poster.

For more Roswell fun: see my Roswell crash in Canada alternate “history”, and Ken Hite’s masterful “Six Flags Over Roswell.” Only quasi-related: A home movie of Britney Spears discussing time travel with K-Fed. (I’m serious: the time travel discussion starts around the 02:30 mark.)