Roswell, New Mexico, USA on the Blogging A – Z Challenge

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23085 – 1110

Here’s the haps:

Before I begin I do have to say that I think it’s crazy that by 1969 people were so ignorant of their own geography that the state of New Mexico had to add the letters USA to their license plate so people would know where they were from.

Anyway, on July 8, 1947, there was the crash of a mysterious, Unidentified Flying Object. A rancher found metal wreckage and burn marks and bodies and called the Air Force. Someone else called the Air Force and asked if there had been a crash near there. They said no and the military rushed to the scene, closed down the city and made the scene off-limits, and told the few people who had seen anything that they would be in big trouble if they ever told about what they saw. An Army official told the press that they had recovered a flying disc only to recant the next day and say it was a weather balloon (were the bodies Chinese?).

Is the government hiding something in Area 51? Do they possess alien technologies and wrecked spacecraft and even the bodies of alien creatures? Of course, they deny it and besides, there is no way the government can win because nobody trusts the government. It doesn’t matter what party you are, do you really think the government is going to give forthright and honest answers? If you trust the government and believe what they tell you, I have a very nice tower in Paris that I would like to sell to you. (Unrelated aside: Con man Victor Lustig actually did sell the Eiffel Tower on two separate occasions.)

Okay, so my take on the whole Roswell thing is that it really doesn’t matter. If it came out tomorrow that it was conclusively true that all the government was hiding and the reason they closed down the whole town of Roswell and an Army spokesman made some sort of huge misspeak and it really was a weather balloon, the reaction would be, “So what? The government finally told the truth for a change.” Or, if the hippie mobs at Area 51 broke through the gates (they need to hire professional looters and rioters like they have in Chicago or Portland or Seattle) and found a bunch of dead aliens and sophisticated alien technology, then what?

But there is an upside to the whole argument no matter what anyone thinks. People want to go to Roswell, NM. An unknown little town off the beaten path in the middle of nowhere is a major tourist attraction. The town has a large community of artists. It has the Roswell Museum which houses the equipment and workshop of Robert H. Goddard, a true rocket scientist along with a large collection of Southwestern art and a planetarium. A children’s museum called Bricktown: Alien Attack which features 250,000 Lego bricks. There is the Miniatures and Curious Collections Museum which has an incredible collection of dollhouses and Roswell has the International UFO Research Museum and a fun place called the Roswell UFO Spacewalk where a couple of my grandkids got their picture taken.

There are also outdoor places like the Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge and Bottomless Lakes State Park and the J. Kenneth Smith Bird Sanctuary & Nature Center. New Mexico has a wild and uniquely beautiful landscape all its own.

Here’s what I think about some of it sometimes. I posted this a few years back and quite a few years back. It really explains a lot if you (don’t) think about it.

Do you ever wonder where things disappear to? For example, you have a favorite pen and you set it down on the table, but when you go to look for it, it’s gone. You look all around the table and the floor and everywhere and then, two days later, when you are not looking for it anymore, it appears in the bathroom behind the sink. The car keys when you need to get somewhere in a hurry and have to leave ten minutes ago. The house key when you return. The comb that sits on the bathroom counter. Various tools that are needed to do an emergency plumbing job. The two-hundred-plus dollar theater tickets someone gave to you and your wife as a present.

Well, there are aliens that live in the walls. They come and take your stuff for study and possibly to collect your DNA to clone you. This cloning is why you get in trouble for things you never did or are seen places that you never were and probably would never go, but someone says, “I know it was you! It had to be you. Who else looks like you?” This accusatory and infallible logic is based on the person seeing your clone, say, walking out of the grocery store with an embarrassing purchase of some high-calorie kind or another under your arm. So, the next time something goes missing or you are seen somewhere you wouldn’t be caught dead, it’s not your evil twin or a doppelganger, just the aliens that live in the walls.

They also have, what I will call in most unscientific terms, “black holes” they use to send things back to their home planet for the scientists there to study. These are things like two hundred dollars worth of theater tickets that you know you sat on your desk just two weeks ago. They have to be on this desk somewhere. There is no other place you could possibly have left them. None. Really. The resident aliens pick up your distress signal through the subtle instruments they have. Like the one that measures the seismic waves in the roof that your wife has just hit because you lost two hundred dollars worth of tickets in that black hole you call a desk!

The aliens, in an attempt to not arouse suspicion because they think you might tear up the walls while searching so frenetically and expose them or perhaps it is some sort of whimsical compassion they have for you that causes them to quickly call for the tickets back from the home planet. But since you are frantically tearing up the desk they decide it would be safer and even kinder to put the tickets in the pocket of the suit you are about to wear, if you ever find the tickets. They then tap your wife on the shoulder (whether she is aware of their existence or is, in fact, in cahoots with them is another question) and she thinks, “Could he have possibly had the foresight to put them in the pocket of his suit?” She then comes walking out and calmly wades through the piles and piles of books and notepapers and rubbish that you have piled everywhere and simply holds them out waiting for you to notice that she is standing there. She hands you the tickets and stomps off with a “humph” and you will just be wasting your time explaining to her that you know, in fact, that you did set them on the corner of the desk.

Likelihood of this happening (visiting Roswell, not confronting the aliens who live in the walls) within the next year: 10+%
Likelihood of this happening in my lifetime (Lord willing, of course): 97+%
Likelihood of running into someone I know or met on the Internet or that lives in my walls: 99%