10/5/17
Early rising with a dip in the hot tub and a soak in the steam room! Brekky was more gorging @ the all you can eat for nothing before we saddled up and headed eastwards for the craziness of Roswell.
For some reason I was expecting that the locals would be cashing in big time on the tourists coming to hear all about UFO sightings and the crash landing.. but they aren’t! The town is actually a run of the mill country town with a couple of really bad tourist souvenir stores on main street. REALLY disappointing! Anyway, the only reason we came to Roswell was to hear all about the crash landing.. the one place to do that is the International UFO museum.
So in we went.. Yep it is cheesy! One of the main “exhibits” is a replica of a flying saucer with grey man wandering around below… It has flashing lights + a smoke machine! About as close as I’m going to get!! The story goes that on July 4th 1947 (yep Independence Day) a UFO crash landed outside of Roswell on the property of Mac Brazel (a cow farmer). The night was stormy and two different groups of people either heard a loud noise (not thunder) or saw flashing lights in the sky reminiscent of a plane crash landing. The next day (July 5) Brazel is riding around on his property checking for storm damage when he comes across debris strewn around on the ground. He collects some of it. Following day (6th July) he drives into town (apparently the crash site is over 3hrs drive from Roswell) to see the local sheriff with his “stuff” who promptly rings the local military intelligence. Eye witnesses claim that Mac brought in a big triangle shaped piece of dull grey metal, pieces of aluminium foil feeling pieces of metal (not shiny though like aluminium foil) and a large eye beam of metal that had strange purple inscriptions on the side. According to the video interview of “eye witnesses” was definitely not any type of writing from Earth. More similar to hieroglyphs or picture drawings (but again nothing decipherable).
On the 7th the military cordon off the “crash site” and the cover up begins. Mac is kept at a military base for 5 days where he ends up returning telling everyone that what he saw was a weather balloon! The official story is that they find a weather balloon, although on the day of the 7th the local military liason is told to write up a story about finding a UFO and broadcast it to the media! So on the 7th the media broadcasts a UFO has crash landed. On the 8th the story is retracted and changed to a weather balloon.
Other military personnel also reported picking up bodies and delivering them to the local hospital (on the 7th). Four in total that were “definitely not human”. They describe four bodies that were grey in colour (no mention of green) small in stature with big heads and almond shaped eyes. Their heads were larger at the top and very narrow/ pointed at the bottom. Your typical alien description with the exception of the colour of the skin. No one said what happened to the bodies post the delivery to the hospital I’m guessing they also flew to DC with the remains of the “debris” found at the site.
After spending a good hour and a half at the museum and watching interviews of many people involved (both ex-military and civilians) I came to the conclusion that a UFO did crash land outside of Roswell + that four aliens were taken from the ship. It sort of makes sense to me why they covered it up in 1947, it was just after the war and the govt didn’t want people panicking thinking they were being invaded by little green men! The bigger question is why they continue to deny it?!?!
My biggest disappointment was the lack of “tack”. Weary followers who have been with me from the start will know all about my obsession with quality tacky souvenirs. There are definite standards and Roswell should have been able to surpass… It did not. Seriously, the crappiest tack I have come across in a long time.. It should be able to cream with the kitsch… It does not!
From Roswell we hit the plains of New Mexico and headed south towards Big Bend NP Texas with Spotify’s Road Trippin’ blaring out of the speakers (until we lost coverage!!!). Lunch had us stop at Guadalupe NP. ‘Twas a memorable lunch stop. Guadalupe is in Texas but is at >8000 ft… It was FREEZING cold and blowing a gale. Blowing so hard that D’s lunch blew away. I haven’t laughed that hard for such a long time. The look on his face when his lunch disappeared.. pure gold! Family- you’ll know what I mean! No joke, we spent the whole lunch time guarding our meals from the wind.. quite reminiscent of Albs on the kitchen table!
Anyway, we froze whilst we ate our lunch so we did a quick wander around the picnic grounds wearing as many layers as we had readily available to hand. Quick wander around and we all jumped at the chance to get back in the car and head down towards Big Bend and hopefully much warmer weather! Who would have thought the southern desert states and we’ve spent half of it freezing our butts off?!?!?! Jumpers + jeans have gotten a work out!
After leaving Guadalupe I got a bit of internet coverage (mobile coverage is excellent in the cities but very patchy outside… quite different to AU.. If you want coverage everywhere (or nearly everywhere) in AU you go with Telstra, right? So I thought it would be the same here.. we’ll pay more and go with AT+T.. wrong! Here it is who has built the towers? (I guess similar to AU) and towns have one of the players…. Feels like AT+T isn’t such a bit player in the south western states…….) so I started hunting for accom at Big Bend.. Hmm. Not much available. It ended up that we stayed in Alpine (80miles north of Big Bend) for this night and I’ve gotten us in to Big Bend NP tomorrow night and just outside at Terlingua the following night.
Probably wasn’t a bad thing as it turned out as we were all pretty tired when we finally made it in to Alpine. We grabbed some microwave dinners, some wine and settled in for an early night in. Da Vinci code was playing on tv so we watched that and headed to sleep. Tomorrow Big Bend!